All the family and all the connections of Hurstmanceaux viewed his marriage as she viewed it. If he had blown his brains out they would have been less shocked, for they would have been able to say that he had had an accident with a revolver or a repeating-rifle. But it was impossible for them to explain away this act of insanity; and though he would probably live down in the country, as people should do who are ashamed of themselves, still, some time or other they would have to meet him, and they felt uncomfortably certain that the head of their house would compel from them respect and deference toward his wife.
Even those few friends who were sincerely attached to him felt, like Daddy Gwyllian, that they could not venture to apologize for a man who had shown such culpable indifference to his own interests and the world’s opinion.
“What has disturbed you, my heart’s dearest?” said Prince Woffram as he came on to the terrace on his return from a golfing match; he had met Daddy Gwyllian a mile from the entrance gate, who had driven past him merely touching his hat.
“What has disturbed you?” he continued. “Did that pleasant little old gentleman come to bring you any ill news?”
Her answer was to throw the telegrams into his hands; from them he gleaned some idea of what had passed.
“Your brother marries? Well, what does that matter?”
“What?” she echoed, her eyes shining and flashing with fury. “If he had married a woman off the pavement of the Haymarket he could not have disgraced us more utterly! And for Alberic Orme to countenance such a disgrace! What an infamy!”
The young man raised his eyebrows and played with the tea-roses of the balustrade. The placidity of his temper opposed itself to the violence of hers like a marble breakwater to the fretting fury of a Venetian lagoon in December.
“She will have my eldest son with her to poison his mind against me!” she added, tears of genuine rage and grief overflowing her lovely eyes. “Have they not even taken away my only daughter from my guardianship?”
The young man was silent; he was not grieved that his friend Boo had been removed to England.