“Oh, Lord!” said the other innocently. “I’ve had his last ages ago. He is a very poor devil is Harry, a very poor devil, else we shouldn’t be in this strait.”
Hurstmanceaux approached him so closely that Cocky, whose nerves were shaken by much absinthe and angostura, trembled.
“I would sooner my sister were on the pavement of the Haymarket than that she were the wife of such a cur as you.”
Cocky breathed more freely.
“That is a very exaggerated remark,” he murmured. “You are so very stagy, my dear Ronald, so very stagy. You should have lived a century or two ago.”
“I am ashamed to be of the same generation as yourself,” said Hurstmanceaux sternly. “Great heavens, man! You come of a good stock; you will be chief of a great house; your father is a gentleman in every fibre of his being; how can you endure to live as you do with your very name a by-word for the cabmen in the street? There is not a servant in your house, not a match-seller on your area steps, not a stableboy in your mews, who does not know the dishonor which you alone affect to ignore! She is my sister, I am ashamed to say; but I can do nothing with her so long as you, her husband, condone and countenance what she does. You have every power; I have none. Take her to Black Hazel, sacrifice yourself for sake of your children, shut yourself up there, try and lead a cleanly life and make her lead an honest one. Cease to be the miserable thing you are—a diseased maggot living on putrefaction?”
Kenilworth listened imperturbably. To be likened to a diseased maggot did not distress him; it slightly diverted him in its appositeness.
“The children?” he said softly and slowly. “You really think I ought to consider those children?”
His pale, expressionless grey eyes, becoming suddenly full of unutterable depth of expression, looked up into his brother-in-law’s and said volumes without words.
Hurstmanceaux grew red to the roots of his bright curly hair. After all, the woman spoken of, if this man’s wife, was his own sister, his favorite sister, the little one whom he had carried about in his arms when a boy, up and down the tapestried galleries and the oak staircases of the dear old house at Faldon.