“No; he’s got to marry Lady Kenny, I suspect,” said another of his friends, using the title by which she had been known to the town so long.
“If I go on as I am doing now, what shall I be when that dear little beggar’s a man?” he thought. He felt that he would be a very poor example for the child he loved. He felt that Jack, who loved him in return, would get no good from him, but might be led into much evil. “I’ll try and pull up,” he said to himself. “If I’m alive twenty years hence, I should like those little chaps to be the better not the worse through knowing me.”
He sighed as he thought so, and then he laughed at himself for being in such a mood. They were Cocky’s sons, of course! Why should he bother about them? His laugh was bitter, but his heart was heavy.
She had used up all the best years of his life, and beggared him to boot, and he had no more power over her than if he had been the crossing-sweeper yonder in St. George’s Place.
Harry was not very wise, and the ways of his life had not been prudent, but a seriousness and sadness which he had never known came over him as he watched the Exmoor pony till it was out of sight, and then walked on by himself in the opposite direction toward Apsley House.
The next week he had a long interview with his father, and another with his Colonel, and in a week or two more he sent in his papers.
“I shall never alter the pace here,” he said to his father, who, much relieved that he did not hear Harry was going to marry the Duchess of Otterbourne, said, cordially: “No, my dear boy, we can’t get out of the swill till we’re clear of the stye!” By which elegant metaphor he meant life in London.
It was growing hot and close in Mayfair and Belgravia, and Jack went for his last ride in the Park one sultry misty morning when the sky was like a grey woolen blanket, and the Serpentine resembled a dull steel mirror as it reflected the forms of the ill-fed and melancholy water-birds.
Tom Tit and Jack were going down on the morrow with the rest of the juvenile household to the country. Their mother was already away from London.
Jack was worrying his mind with wondering how he should see his favorite friend in the country. In other years Harry had generally been where they were, that is to say, when they accompanied their mother to Homburg, or Carlsbad, or Cowes, or Staghurst, or Scotland. But Jack was uncomfortably and dimly conscious that those pleasant days were over and were not likely to be renewed. It is hard at his age to have to look back to the past with regret. But Jack felt that nothing in his present was likely to be so agreeable as those merry days when his mother and Harry had been such good friends.