“Then I’ll live with Harry.”
The nurse, who was discretion itself, answered, “Your Grace will do just whatever your Grace wishes.”
“That’ll be jolly,” said the new duke; and he stood on his golden head.
“But I suppose I shall always have to behave very well,” he thought, in a soberer moment. The obligation was painful; Jack’s natural man was naughty; not as naughty as Boo wished him to be, but still naughty, naughty in a frank sportive merry way, as colts are skittish and pups destructive.
His mother enjoyed her luncheon, because that long Service had given her renewed appetite, and she was infinitely diverted by Lily Larking’s wreath; but, all the same, she felt as she had never felt in her life, lonely, insecure, anxious, apprehensive. Cocky had been more support to her than she had realized before his death; his connivance, his condonation, his ready resources in difficulty, his unlimited unscrupulousness, had all been more useful and more valuable than she had ever realized until they were all lost to her for ever. Their association had not been much more creditable than that of two thieves or marauders, but mutual interest had bound them together as it binds those, and the link, when broken, left a blank.
Moreover, had she not married him to be Duchess of Otterbourne? She was Duchess of Otterbourne now, but shorn of all the advantages appertaining to the title except the mere barren rank. Anything more odious than the position of a widow living on her jointure and bullied by trustees, could not, she thought, be conceived. She had not been able to grasp the sense of Cocky’s will as it had been read aloud in its barbarous legal jargon and bastard Latin, but she had understood that it was “nasty,” very nasty in its provisions; and that as guardians of the children, there were appointed her brother and Augustus Orme, the churchman. She seemed, herself, to come in nowhere, and to have no power or privileges of any sort, and to be cut down as utterly in every way as the provisions of her marriage settlements allowed.
There had been so much solidarity between Cocky and herself in their way of looking at life, in their enjoyment of ruse and expedient, in their mutual sense of the injustice and the nuisance of things, that this sympathy between them had prevented her from perceiving that the man she had married hated her very bitterly for having married him. She was not in the least prepared for the many forms of vengeance which were gathered together in that neat and formal document which was the last will and testament of the companion of her life.
Cocky had never expected to outlive his father; but he had always said to himself: “By God, if I do——!”
The law—that stiff, starched, unbending, and unpleasant thing which comes so often between us and our desires—had denied him the pleasure of doing much that he had wished to do, but all that it had let him do he had done to punish and torment the lady who had wedded him “with a card up her sleeve.”
When Hurstmanceaux and Alberic Orme came to visit her, after the lawyers and the other members of the family had left the castle, they were both surprised to see how seriously depressed and how much worn she looked.