“If you only sent for me to hear you quarrel over the ownership of the Blenheims——” said Hurstmanceaux. He was angry; he had to attend a Royal Commission at two o’clock, and he wanted to be instead on the river, watching the practice of the Eton eight of which his youngest brother was captain. And here he was, shut up at half-past twelve with two bickering people and two barking lap-dogs, with the prospect of hearing for an hour of debts and difficulties which he had neither the power nor the will to meet or dissipate. “Pray let me hear the worst at once,” he added. “Is it the Old Bailey, or only the Bankruptcy Court, that Cocky is going to show himself in this time to an admiring society?”
His sister looked at him and saw that he was not in a pleasant mood; but she did not mind his moods, they always ended in giving her what she wanted. He was an intrinsically generous and compassionate man, and such tempers are always kindly to their own hurt.
“Damned ungrateful fellow he is!” reflected Cocky. “As if there wasn’t one Court that he ought to bless me for never going into.”
But he said nothing aloud, and left the recital of their difficulties to his wife.
She plunged immediately into the narrative of their woes and needs, the Blenheims, reduced to silence through want of breath, sitting with their tongues out and their heads on one side, listening attentively as though they were two auditors in bankruptcy.
Hurstmanceaux listened also in an unsympathetic silence which to his companions seemed to bode no good to themselves. There was nothing new in the relation; debts have seven-leagued boots, as everyone knows, and people who spend a few thousands every year in railway journeys, but do not pay their tailor, shoemaker, and greengrocer, realize this with unpleasant frequency. Then there were debts of honor in all directions, these being the only form of honor which was left to the delinquents as Hurstmanceaux thought, but charitably forebode to say.
He looked at his sister whilst she spoke, admiring her appearance whilst he scarcely attended to her words because he knew their import beforehand so painfully well. What a terribly expensive animal was a modern woman of the world! As costly as an ironclad and as complicated as a theatrophone. The loveliest product of an entirely artificial state, but the most ruinous, and the most irritating to those whom she ruined.
He told himself that Daddy Gwyllian had been entirely right. And he hardened his heart against this beautiful apparition which with dewy lips, perfumed hair, and a delicious suggestion of a nymph fresh from a waterbrook, stood before him in that charming attitude of contrition and candor with which from her nursery days he had always known her tell her very largest lies.
“So all the dirt you’ve eaten hasn’t done you any good,” he said curtly, after some minutes of silence.
“What can you possibly mean?” said Mouse.