Of course Jack was only a boy, and his spirits came back to him in time, and his laugh rang through the old oak hall of his uncle’s house, but he did not forget. He never forgot.
When he had been left alone for the night he got up in his bed, and knelt on it, and said in a whisper, for fear his servant who slept in the next room should hear:
“Please God, be good to Harry, and tell him I remember.”
O fair illusion; fair, however false! Happy is the dead soul which has left its image enshrined in the tender heart of a child!
CHAPTER XXXIX.
“We are here,” wrote Boo to her eldest brother half a year later. “It’s quite hot: one wants summer frocks. There are no end of Germans and Russes to play with; but I don’t like them. Mammy’s got a new man made of millions, or rather she has not got him and it makes her cross. He gave me a gold Cupid seal—so pretty. She took it away from me, and sent it as a wedding-present to Daisy Ffiennes. Wasn’t that like mammy? She never speaks of you. She says uncle Ronnie has made you a bad boy.”
The letter was dated from Cannes.
Jack had good sense enough to put the note in the roaring fire of old salt-encrusted ship logs which was burning on the great hearth of Faldon’s central hall, before which he and many dogs were lying in the gloom of the December afternoon. He did not envy his sister the roses and mimosa and white lilac of Cannes. His mother had gone there because everybody in the winter does go there, or to Egypt, or to India; but she was out of temper with Fate, as her little daughter had said. She did not wish for more adventures. She dreaded other tyrants. She wanted to have two things in one: liberty and money. Of marriage she was afraid. Where find another Cocky?
Still in her moments of sober reflection she knew that she must marry, or risk drifting into an insecure, shifty, and discreditable position. Liaisons, however agreeable and amusing, are not sheet-anchors. Besides, she had been on the verge of losing her reputation—she knew what the danger feels like; and to become one of the throng of people who live on their knees outside the gates which once opened wide to them would have been infinitely more odious to her than an over dose of chloral. She was Duchess of Otterbourne, but she was very much more in her own sight and that of her family; she was a Courcy of Faldon.
That memory had been powerless to keep her feet straight in the path of honor; but it was strong enough to make her feel that she would die sooner than go down in the dust amongst the discrowned—the discrowned who live in Pyrenean watering-places, or second-rate Italian cities, or German baths out of their season, and are made much of at the hands of consuls’ wives and British chaplains, and who sneak back to their people’s country house in England, and are received there as a family obligation, and never more are seen in London between Easter and Goodwood. Such an existence she would no more have led than she would have worn a three-guinea ready-made gown bought at an annual sale. She had always led the first flight in the hunting-field or out of it.