And there had been a time when in that very house he had been a pretty, innocent, beloved child; when he had been clasped in a mother’s arms, her idol and her hope; when he had run across those lawns without with fleet feet and flying hair; when old servants had watched his every step, repeated his every word, and a proud race had seen in him the security for its future continuance and honor!
The vicar by sheer force of habit folded his hands, composed a pious face, and began a prayer.
“O Lord our God, let this Thy good and faithful servant——”
“Stop that,” said Cocky, opening his eyes. “I won’t bluff the Almighty just at the last out of funk.”
It was one feeble flicker of the honor of his race, which he had outraged and derided all the forty years of his life, but which in the moment of death came to him for one second. The words shocked his hearers as a blasphemy, but in truth they expressed the only honorable scruple of a dishonorable life. He would not “bluff the Almighty”; he would not at the end of all, and in the face of death, turn, out of fear, to what he had mocked and ridiculed through all his years of life.
“Get on the bed and kiss your poor dear papa, my lord,” whispered the nurse, who had followed Jack into the room lest he should worry her lady.
Jack hung back, reluctant, but the slender white hands of his mother, which could hold so tightly, gripped him round the waist and lifted him on to the bed. He burst out crying from fright and a vague pity which stirred in his childish bosom. Then his compassion made him conquer his fears. He put his fresh rosy mouth shrinkingly to the waxen sunken cheek of the dying man. But Cocky by a supreme effort turned his head away with a glare of anger in his eyes, and the child’s warm lips kissed the pillow.
“Damn you and your brats!” he said, with enfeebled voice but intensified venom, and his gaze, full of meaning, met hers, and said all which he had never spoken through all the years in which she had borne his name.
“It is so sad how often the dying take a hatred to what they love best in life,” she murmured to the London physician, a bland bald person who had buried patients in Westminster Abbey, and that second best Valhalla, St. Paul’s.
“Damn you and all your brats!” Cocky muttered feebly again as his gaze sought and found his wife’s face through the mist of unreality which was fast hiding all the facts and figures of existence from him for evermore.