She was thinking as she knelt of the alterations she would make in the house; the gardens were old-fashioned and would have to be laid out afresh; the circular entrance-hall should be made a patio like Frederic Leighton’s and have a glass dome; the picture gallery sadly wanted weeding, and the process of weeding might be made lucrative to the weeder, for dealers would buy anything out of Otterbourne House with their eyes shut; the small oval room painted by Angelica Kauffman should be her boudoir. “I sha’n’t need to bore myself with Billy,” she thought: the duke had not been a rich man and had been impoverished by his sacrifices to assist Cocky; but still things would be very different to the hand-to-mouth life which they led, and which drove her to support the nuisance of Harrenden House and Vale Royal, and similar expedients. The Duchess of Otterbourne would, she reckoned, have a free hand at least for a time; and they would probably be able to sell lots of things despite the entail.
Alberic Orme arrived that night from his country vicarage; he was white, haggard, inexpressibly grieved; he had loved his father dearly.
“Where is my brother?” he asked her.
The two younger sons were away—the one with his ship, the other with his troop—in the Indian Ocean and at the Cape.
“Cocky?” said Cocky’s wife. “Oh, they are looking for him. They will find him—in some pot-house!”
And so they did on the following morning.
When messengers in hot haste went flying over London to find his son, and telegrams were being despatched to the lamented duke’s country seats and county towns, Cocky was drinking gin and playing poker with half-a-dozen persons, more congenial than distinguished, at a little riverside inn near Marlow, where he had been spending three days lost to the world, but dear at least to the hearts of Radical journalists. When at last he was found, and the fatal accident to his father communicated to him, Cocky, who, however drunk he might be, never became a fool, pulled himself together, comprehended the position, and put all the money lying about in his pocket.
“Damned if they’ll dare ask a duke for it!” he said to himself with a chuckle, and walked quite steadily to the carriage which had come for him, not casting even a look at his late companions, male or female, who were too awed and astonished, as well as too befumed with various drinks to stop him or even to speak to him.
“I’ll have a rattling good time now,” he thought, as he drove to the Marlow station. “And I’ll divorce her; Lord, what a joke it’ll be! Perhaps they won’t give it me; I dare say they won’t give it me; there’s a marplot called the Queen’s Proctor; they’ll talk of collusion, and she’ll bring counter-charges, and all the rest of it; but we’ll have the fun all the same, and she won’t be able to show her face at Court. They’re so damned particular at Court about the people who are found out! So is society: she’ll be drummed out of society. Lord, what fun it will be!”
Better even than gin and poker and music-hall singers and shady bookmakers in a village on the Thames.