As yet, he had, in his own ambitious sense of the words, failed to buy them. He remained one of the obscure rich, who are unknown to fame and to princes. It was not for lack of expenditure that he had hitherto failed to gratify his social ambitions. He had not understood how to set about the matter; he had been timid and awkward; his wife had been a drag on him, and his daughter, on whom he had counted for the best of assistance, had declined to accept the office which he assigned to her. He had lost time, missed occasions, failed to advance to his goal in a manner which intensely irritated a man who had never before this been foiled or baulked in any of his plans. He had learned that the great world was not a drinking den, to be entered by “bluff,” with a nugget in one hand and a revolver in the other; and in this stage of chagrin and disappointment, Lady Kenilworth held out her hand to him. He had done all that he knew how to do. He had been returned for a metropolitan division and elected to the Carlton. He and his wife had been presented at Court almost as soon as they had arrived in England. They had been invited to a few political houses. They had gone where everybody went in summer, winter, spring, and autumn. His subscriptions were many and large. His financial value was recognized by Conservative leaders. But there he remained. He was an outsider, and in this period of perplexity, disappointment, and futile aspirations to the “smart world,” Lady Kenilworth, the high priestess of smartness, held out her hand to him.
CHAPTER IV.
Lady Kenilworth was the prettiest woman in England; her family, the Courcys of Faldon, was renowned for physical charms, and she was the loveliest of them all, exactly reproducing a famous Romney which portrayed the features of her great great grandmother.
She had eyes like forget-me-nots, a brilliantly fair skin, a purely classic profile, a mass of sunny shining hair, which needed no arts to brighten or to ripple it, and a carriage, which for airy grace and supreme distinction, had its equal nowhere among her contemporaries. Her baptismal name of Clare had been almost entirely abandoned by her relatives and friends, and she was always called by them Mouse, a nickname given her in nursery days when she pillaged her elder sisters’ bonbons and made raids on the early strawberry beds, and which had gained in the course of time many variations, such as Sourisette, Petit Rat, Topinetta, Fine-ears, Liebe Mus, and any other derivative which came to the lips of her associates.
She had a mouse painted on the panels of her village cart, stamped in silver on her note paper, mounted in gold on her riding whip, cut in chrysoprase as a charm, and made of diamonds as a locket; and many and various were the forms in which the little rodent was offered to her by her adorers on New Year’s Day and at Easter. She had, indeed, so identified herself with the nickname, that when she signed her name in a royal album, or to a ceremonious letter, she had great difficulty in remembering to write herself down Clare Kenilworth.
When she had been brought out at eighteen years old, she had been the idol of the season; people had stood on chairs and benches in the Park to see her drive to her first Drawing-room. It was not only her physical charms which were great, but her manner, her scornful grace, her airy hauteur, and the mixture in her expression of daredevil audacity and childlike innocence, were fascinations all her own. The way she wore her clothes, the way she moved, the things she said, the challenge of her sapphire eyes, were all enchanting and indescribable. She “fetched the town” as soon as she was out in an amazing manner; and it was thought that she had thrown away her chances in an astonishing degree when it was known that she had accepted the hand of a little mauvais sujet, known as Cocky to all London and half Europe, who passed his time in the lowest company he could find, and was without stamina, principles, or credit. But she knew what she was about, and without giving any explanation to her people, she dismissed the best men, and decided to select the worst she could find; the worst, at least, physically and morally.
True, he always looked a gentleman, even when he was soaked in brandy and gin as the wick of a tea-kettle is soaked in spirits of wine. Cocky’s hands, Cocky’s profile, Cocky’s slow soft voice, had always proclaimed his race, even whilst he chaffed a cabman whom he could not pay.
True, he was by courtesy Earl of Kenilworth, and would certainly be, if he outlived his father, Duke of Otterbourne; but then he was besides that and beyond that to all his world—Cocky, and a more disreputable little sinner than Cocky it would have been hard to find in the peerage or out of it.
But Cocky “suited her book”; and to the horror of her own family and the amazement of his, this radiant débutante selected as her partner for life this little drunkard, who had one lung already gone and who formed the whipping-boy and stalking-horse of every Radical newspaper in Great Britain.
At a garden party on the river Lord Kenilworth showed himself for once in decent society, and unfuddled by pick-me-ups and eye-openers. He walked alone with the beauty of the year under an elm avenue by the waterside, and this was their conversation: