Kenilworth saw that emotion and despised it, but thought he would profit by it and do a bit of dignity.
“My dear Ronnie,” he said almost seriously, “if I had married another sort of woman than your sister Clare, I might have become a different sort of man. It is not likely; still, it is possible. But, you may believe me, if she had married the best man under heaven, she would have been just exactly what she is. Sages and angels wouldn’t alter her. Don’t you fret yourself about us. We aren’t worth it—I grant that. We are of our time, and we shall get along somehow. Ta-ta, Ronnie; you are a good boy. Be grateful that I am what I am; if I were like you, vieux jeu, what a bother I should have made for our respective families long ago in the D. C.”
And with a low complacent chuckle at having got the best of the argument, he dived under his seat for his hat, glanced at the clock, and, with an apologetic gesture of two fingers, left Hurstmanceaux alone in the morning-room with the chinoiseries and nipponiséries.
“Now his conscience will work and make him miserable,” he thought, as he went across the hall with satisfaction. “After all, I said the truth, and he knows it is the truth. She is his sister, and she’s a bad a lot as there is in London, and he’ll feel he owes me something, and he’ll come down handsomely, stingy old bloke though he is. What duffers those sentiment men always are to be sure. How neat I handled him. Gad, if he didn’t blush like a girl!”
And Cocky stepped lightly down Park Lane to Hamilton Place and entered the Bachelors Club “fancying himself very much,” as he would have expressed it; and quite aware that his strategy would end sooner or later in an interview more or less agreeable to his interests between his own lawyers and those of his brother-in-law.
CHAPTER XIX.
It was another wet and chilly Easter in another year, and the town had just begun to fill after the recess, when one morning after luncheon the good Duke of Otterbourne, as his county called him, riding down the Kensington high road, was thrown from his horse, between whose forelegs a bicycle had staggered and fallen. The boy on the bicycle was but scarcely bruised; the Duke was carried insensible to the nearest pharmacy and never rallied. By four o’clock he was dead; and many persons, men and women, old and young, gentle and simple, felt their eyes wet as the news of his death circulated through the Park and streets.
His daughter-in-law heard of it as she drove in at Hyde Park Corner; a man she knew stopped her carriage and broke the intelligence to her as gently as he could. She was shocked for a moment; then she thought to herself: “We shall have Otterbourne House now, and I suppose there’ll be money, at least for a time.” Then, as she always studied appearances, she went home decorously and busied herself telegraphing to his family and her own.
The body of the old duke had been already taken to Otterbourne House and laid on his bed in those modest rooms opening on the gardens, to which she had so often desired to limit him. His features were calm and wore a look of peace; his neck had been broken in the fall; it was thought probable that he had suffered nothing, not even a passing pang. Whilst telegrams were being sent all over England, and it grew dusk, she came, clothed in black, and knelt by the low bed, weeping. She always did what was right in small things, and at any moment some member of her family or his might enter the room. Meanwhile messengers of all degrees, servants, grooms, commissionaires, telegraph boys, were rushing to and fro over the metropolis and its environs in their vain search for the Earl of Kenilworth. No one had any idea where Cocky was.
No one had seen him for two days; his absence was of so slight an account that even his valet never took any heed of it; it was surmised that he was in congenial society.