“The finest thoroughbred mare will chew dry reeds when she finds she can’t get hay or oats,” he thought, his mind reverting to his memories of the Egyptian campaign, which he had shared in as an amateur. The brother of Lady Kenilworth should have known that women of the world are more “kittle cattle” than even blood-mares; but he did not realize this.
He knew that she was unreasonable, wildly extravagant, very selfish, and so accustomed to have her own way that she thought the stars would pause in their courses to please her; but still, even she would stop short of absolute social suicide, he thought.
So when next he received a note from his sister asking him to come to her on a matter of importance, which always with her meant money, he took his way to the conference determined to tell her frankly that the retreat to the west of Ireland was the only possible refuge for her, and to keep well in his memory the sensible warning and counsel of Daddy Gwyllian.
When he got to the house in Stanhope Street he found Cocky waiting to see him before he went out. This fact alone was ominous and extremely disagreeable to him, the presence of Cocky, in his wife’s morning-room, invariably indicating not only that money was wanted, which was chronic, but that some more than usually unpleasant dilemma had to be met.
Cocky’s paper was all over the place, as he would have expressed it; and very often in hands so disreputable that its rescue was a matter as compromising as it was costly.
When he was walking about amongst the china and the trinkets, and the flowers and the lacquer work, with his thin pale aquiline profile against the light, and the Blenheims barking furiously at him as they invariably did, his presence was the certain sign of something impending which might get with most odious prominence into the newspapers.
“If he’s forged anybody’s name, I only hope to heavens that it’s only mine,” thought Hurstmanceaux: he always expected Cocky to come to forgery sooner or later. In point of fact, Cocky had come to it very early in his career, as early as his Eton days, when he had been ducked in the river by the comrade with whose name he had taken such liberties.
With his hands in his trowser pockets and his little frail person flitting amongst the chinoiseries and the heaths and orchids, he peered up at this moment at Hurstmanceaux where he stood on the hearth, very tall, very stern, very unsympathetic, and absolutely silent.
“What a glum brute he is,” Cocky thought of the man to whom he had owed his own social salvation a score of times. “What an uncommon nasty thing human nature must be that it must always look so deuced unpleasant whenever it finds anybody in trouble.”
Cocky was of opinion that it was the first duty of other men to pick himself out of the mud whenever he got into it, and that it should not only be the duty of his neighbors but their pleasure.