But he was an ever present horror in her life. He could subdue her with a glance of his colorless, dull eyes. She no longer dragged him behind in the dust of her chariot; she was dragged in the dust behind his. She was tortured by the ever harrowing dread that others would notice the change. She had even lost the spirits and the nerve to invent fictions to account for such a change to her friends. She let things drift in apathy and disgust and fear.
From Homburg he let her go on to Carlsbad, where he did not show himself, and thence on a visit to a sister of hers who had married a Magyar magnate, where she was for a while in peace, since there certainly her tyrant could not go.
Her children were meantime still at Whiteleaf, a ducal property, of which Alberic Orme held the living, where they and the Blenheims had a healthier, if less brilliant, life than had been their portion when with her. She had no anxiety about them. She knew that their uncle Ronnie would see to all that was necessary for them. She hated his conscientiousness bitterly, but she trusted to it as to a staff which would never break.
The vast domain of Staghurst had already been let to an Indian maharajah. Otterbourne House had been leased to the representative of a great Power. All other houses and estates were similarly disposed of, and the strictest measures were being taken to make the little Duke’s minority fruitful.
The dreadful debaucheries of Cocky had impoverished his father woefully, and the entail had been eaten into as the eastern coast of England is being gnawed away by the sea. But the long minority would do much to restore the fallen fortunes of the great dukedom, and a strict economy was inaugurated.
Her own jointure was of course paid regularly to her; but it seemed to her brother that it must be utterly insufficient to afford her means to live as she chose to live. A great disquietude and alarm always weighed on him about her, but she had chosen to quarrel with him. He could not sue for reconciliation when he was in the right.
Hurstmanceaux was as tender-hearted as he was proud, and if she had made any sign of contrition or affection he would have forgiven all her insolence and have gone to her at once. But she had shut the door in his face; she had insulted him by the lips of her little daughter. He could not make any advances to her. For her own part she was relieved not to see him. Something might have transpired to excite his suspicions; he might have noticed the altered tone of William Massarene, or he might have interrogated her as to her ways and means, and found her replies unsatisfactory. He was much better away, and she made no sign to him. Her movements he heard of from his other sisters, and from the columns of the Morning Post. In the late autumn he saw that she was staying at Vale Royal; the Christmas recess she passed with Carrie Wisbeach; the new year saw her in a suite of rooms at the Residential Hotel facing Hyde Park.
“How does she get the ready money?” he said to Lady Wisbeach, who had come from her journey round the globe as though she had only been down to Greenwich.
“Oh, a woman alone, you know, with only a maid,” said that loyal lady carelessly, “a woman alone needn’t spend more than a sparrow. It isn’t as if she had the children. And then in mourning, and hardly going out except to quiet little things——”
Hurstmanceaux did not find the explanation very satisfactory.