“Figuratively? I mean what I say. Well, of course he’s got shirts to his back; but that is pretty well all he has got. And he is guardian to the boy, to all the children.”
“I understand.”
He saw in what a position Hurstmanceaux would be placed between his duty to his wards and his sentiment for his sister if the knowledge of what had been done with the roc’s egg came before him. “But if he be a poor man it would be no use to worry him,” thought Beaumont, who was keenly practical, and who, in this matter, merely wanted to get his money back, and to be safely out of what he knew was not a very creditable position for himself, since the family would naturally argue that he should not have taken Lady Kenilworth’s unsupported word in a matter of so much importance.
“Everyone knows the high character of Lord Hurstmanceaux,” he said, to gain time for his own reflections. Mouse repressed a rude exclamation; she was so utterly sick of Ronnie’s character. A brother who had known how to do all the things that Cocky had used to do, and would have put her up to doing them, would have been so much more useful at the moment. She felt that she had not drunk at the fountain of knowledge during her husband’s lifetime as she ought to have done. For a person who was not hampered by scruples she was most blamably ignorant about the ins and outs and hooks and crooks of left-handed financing.
Beaumont waited in polite silence. He was not a hard or harsh man and he was not insensible to the purity of her profile as she stood sideways against the window; he saw that she was genuinely alarmed and genuinely powerless; the folded crape which went crossways over her bosom heaved with her deep drawn hurried breathing.
“Have you no friend?” he said at last very softly and with a world of meaning in the tone.
She changed countenance; she could not pretend to misunderstand his meaning.
“Friends have more sympathy than relatives,” he added in the same meditative manner. “It is true, madame, that your dilemma is not in itself interesting; it resembles too much actions which receive unlovely names when in a lower class than yours, still a beautiful woman can always persuade the weaker sense to be blind to her errors; at least until those errors have been proclaimed in print, so that all who run may read them.”
He took a natural and not a very malignant vengeance in his words, but to her he seemed a very Mephistopheles torturing her with every refined devilry.
And she was insulted and she could not resent! She could not ring for her servants and have this man turned into the street.