The Kenilworths, like many other wedded people, had no common bond whatever, except when they were united against somebody else; they bickered, sneered, and quarreled whenever they were by any rare chance alone, but when it was a question of attacking any third person their solidarity was admirable. Hurstmanceaux seemed to them both to have been created by nature and law to be of use to them, to carry them over troublesome places, and to lend them the ægis of his unblemished name; but of any gratitude to him neither ever dreamed; it always seemed to them that he did next to nothing for them, though if the little folks upstairs had roast mutton and sago pudding, and if the servants in Stanhope Street got their wages with any regularity, it was usually wholly due to his intervention.
He had succeeded to heavily encumbered estates, and the years of his minority, though they had done something, had not done much toward lessening the burden which lay on the title, and he had always been a poor man. But now, when he was nearing forty years of age, he could say that he was a free one.
To obtain such freedom it had required much self-denial and philosophy, and he had incurred much abuse in his family and out of it, and, as he was by nature careless and generous, the restraint upon his inclinations had been at times irksome and well-nigh unendurable. But he had adhered to the plan of retrenchment which he had cut out for himself, and it had been successful in releasing him from all obligations without selling a rood of land on any estate, or cutting any more timber than was necessary to the health of the woods themselves. He was called “the miser” commonly amongst his own people; but he did not mind the nickname; he kept his hands clean and his name high, which was more than do all his contemporaries and compeers.
When he had left his sister this morning, and had got as far as the head of the staircase, his heart misgave him. Poor Mousie, had he been too rough on her? Did she really want money? He turned back and entered the little room again where Lady Kenilworth was sitting before the hearth, her elbow on her knee, her cheek on her hand, her blue eyes gazing absently on the fire.
He came up to her and laid his hand on her shoulder.
“My dear Sourisette! Are you troubled about money?”
“You know I always am, Ronnie,” she said impatiently. “It is chronic with us; it always will be; even when the Poodle goes to glory it will be hardly any better. You know that.”
The Poodle was the irreverent nickname given to the Duke of Otterbourne by his eldest son and that son’s wife, on account of his fleecy-white hair and his bland ceremonious manners of the old school, at which they saw fit to laugh irreverently.
“My poor child! If you have no more solid resource than to decant Poodle’s demise your prospects look blue; I always tell you so. Poodle means living and loving on into the twentieth century, never doubt that.”
“I don’t doubt it,” said Mouse very angrily. “He will always do everything which can by any possibility most annoy us.”