“Why didn’t you splice her to Ronnie?”
“He won’t even look at her.”
“How exactly like him!” said Cocky. “If there’s a thing he might do to oblige one he always kicks at it.”
Hurstmanceaux always seemed to them odiously unfeeling and huffy; nevertheless, as they always did in their troubles, they sent to him to come and speak to them one day when their creditors had been more offensive than usual. He was so rarely in town that they agreed it was only prudent to take advantage of his being there for a week or two on account of evidence he had to give before a House of Lords Committee on an Irish land question.
What Daddy Gwyllian had said once in the smoking-room at Otterbourne House, and had more than once since then repeated, dwelt in Hurstmanceaux’s memory, and made him doubt whether it was indeed worth while to go on impoverishing himself for people who had neither gratitude nor scruple.
After all, if the Duke of Otterbourne’s eldest son went into the Bankruptcy Court, it was the Duke of Otterbourne’s affair.
It would be cruelly hard on Otterbourne, who was himself one of the most upright, honorable and conscientious of gentlemen. But it would be still harder on himself, Hurstmanceaux, after his long self-denial and self-sacrifice to find himself in Queer Street for sake of his brother-in-law, a brother-in-law whom he considered, in his own forcible language, not fit to be touched with a pair of tongs.
If they would only retire awhile and retrench they could pull themselves together. Cocky had an estate in the west of Ireland, entirely unsaleable for the best of reasons that nobody would buy it, but which Hurstmanceaux considered a very heaven upon earth, for its views of land and sea were sublime, and its myrtle and bay thickets, its pine and cork woods, had almost the beauty of Cintra with the vast billows of the Atlantic rolling on the rocky shores at their feet. If they would go to this place, called Black Hazel, and live there for a few years, their affairs would come round, and Mouse would be taken out of that vicious circle of unending expenditure and compromising expedient in which women of the world turn like squirrels in a cage.
To the innocence of this simple masculine mind it seemed quite possible that if such a course were suggested to her she would follow it. She was fond of the children; Black Hazel would be a paradise for them; she liked sport—Black Hazel offered quail, woodcock, blackcock, teal in abundance, and both fresh water and deep sea fishing to any extent.
He enumerated its attractions enthusiastically to himself as if he were an auctioneer endeavoring to sell the estate, and, with the naïveté of an honest man, imagined that after all his sister could only need to have her duty clearly shown her to do it.