Two weeks later the Massarenes breakfasted in Stanhope Street expressly to meet an imperial grand duchess who at that time was running about London; and the grand duchess was very smiling and good-natured, and chattered volubly, and invited herself to dinner at Harrenden House.
“They do tell me,” she said graciously, “that you have such a wonderful Clodion.”
Three weeks later William Massarene allowed himself to be led into the purchase of a great Scotch estate of moor, seashore, and morass, in the extreme northwest of Scotland, which had come to Brancepeth through his late maternal grandmother, and which had been always considered as absolutely unsaleable on account of certain conditions attached to its purchase, and of the fact that it had been for many years ill-preserved and its sport ruined, the deer having been destroyed by crofters.
Brancepeth, who was primitive and simple in many of his ideas, had demurred to the transaction.
“This beggar don’t know anything about sport,” he said to the intermediary, Mouse; “’cause he’s buying a deer forest he takes for granted he’ll find deer. ’Tisn’t fair, you know. One ought to tell him that he’ll get no more stalking there than he’d get on Woolwich Common.”
“Why should you tell him anything?” said his friend. “He can ask a factor, can’t he?”
“Well, but it would only be honest, you know.”
“You are odiously ungrateful,” said Mouse with much heat. “I might have made the man buy Black Alder of us, and I chose to get him to buy your place instead.”
Brancepeth made a droll face very like what Jack would make when he kept in a naughty word for fear of his nurse. He thought to himself that the fair lady who was rating him knew very well that her share in the purchase-money of Black Alder, which belonged to her lord, would have been remarkably small, whilst her share of that of Blair Airon—but there are some retorts a man who is a gentleman cannot make, however obvious and merited they may be.
“Get him to buy ’em both,” he said, tossing cakes to the Blenheims. “You do what you like with the cad; turn him round your little finger. One’s just as much a white elephant as t’other, and it’s no use knowing sweeps unless you make ’em clean your chimneys.”