But who could blame Cocky’s wife for anything? Besides, the duke was of that old English temper, now grown so rare, which thought dishonor carried into a law court was only made much worse by the process, and was painfully conscious that Kenilworth, although he looked like a gentleman, spoke like one, moved like one, and wore his clothes like one, was in many sorrowful respects a cad. But a clever cad! Yes, Cocky was clever by nature, if not by study; that was perhaps the very worst part of the whole matter. He could play the fool—did play it almost perpetually—but he had not been born a fool.
There was not even that excuse for him.
He was a man of considerable intelligence, whom indolence, depravity, and disinclination to take trouble had made approach very nearly to an idiot. But, as his mind had odd nooks and corners in it, which contained out-of-the-way scraps of learning sometimes profound, so his character had, occasionally, spasms in it of resolve and of volition, which showed that he might have been a different person to the mere nonentity and lounger that he was, if he had been forced to work for his living. As it was he was the butt of his friends, the torture of his father, the ridicule of his wife, and the favorite whipping-boy of the press and public, when they wanted indirectly to slate a prince or directly to pillory an order. As a gun loaded to the muzzle, which could at any moment be discharged with deadly effect at the Upper House, he was unspeakably dear to the Radicals.
One day, in a Hyde Park meeting met to howl against the Lords, Cocky, who was riding his cob down the road past the Achilles, heard his own name spoken, and his fitness for an hereditary legislator irreverently denied. He stopped to listen, putting his glass in his eye to see his adversaries.
“My good people, you are all wrong,” he called to them at a pause in the oration. “I’m a commoner. Plain John Orme, without a shilling to bless myself with. Don’t suppose I shall ever live to get into the Lords. The Pater’s lungs are much sounder than mine, and his politics too; for he’d trounce you all round, and give each of you a horse-drench.”
So oddly constituted are mobs, that this one laughed and cheered him for the speech, and Cocky, much diverted, got off his cob in Hamilton Place, at the Batchelor’s Club, and went to refresh his throat with a glass of brandy.
It was his sole appearance in public life.
“Told ’em you’d give each of ’em a horse-drench,” he said with a faint chuckle, the next time he saw his father.
“Thanks,” said Otterbourne; “and if they break my windows the next time they’re out, will you pay for the glazier?”
“Never pay for anything,” said Cocky, solemnly and truthfully. And it was probably the only truthful word that he had spoken for many years.