“You would do everything except pay the account! I don’t think you would do much with the riches of all the world except run through them,” said Hurstmanceaux curtly, and taking no notice of the appeal. Past experience had taught him that money which passed through his sister’s fingers had a knack of never reaching its destination. “I won’t compromise you,” he added; “don’t be afraid, and I shall tell them that they have lost your custom.”
“You need not say that,” said Mouse uneasily; she was very fond of this particular Bond Street shop, and what was the use of paying an account if you did not avail yourself of the advantage so gained by opening another one instantly?
“I certainly shall say it,” said Hurstmanceaux decidedly; and he once more left the room. Mouse looked after him with regret and uneasiness; regret that she had turned his generous impulse to such small account, and uneasiness lest he should suspect more of her affairs than it would be well for him to learn.
“He is a good fellow sometimes, but so stiff-necked and mule-headed,” she thought, as she hastily calculated in her rapidly working brain how much percentage she might have got off the Bond Street account if she had dealt with the matter herself. She was extravagant, but she was very keen about money at the same time, at once prodigal and parsimonious, which is a more general combination than most people suppose.
Hurstmanceaux looked back at her rather wistfully from between the cream-colored, rose-embroidered curtains of the doorway. It was on his lips to ask her not to pursue her patronage of Harrenden House; but as he had just promised to do her a service he could not seem to dictate to her an obedience as a return payment to him. He went away in silence.
“Besides, whatever she were to promise she would always do as she liked,” he reflected: previous experiences having told him that neither threats nor persuasions ever had the slightest effect upon his sister’s actions.
As he went out of the vestibule into the street, he passed a tall, very good-looking young man who was about to enter, and who nodded to him familiarly as one brother may nod to another. Hurstmanceaux said a curt good-day without a smile. The other man passed in without the preliminary of enquiring whether the lady of the house was at home, and the footman of the antechamber took off his great coat and laid his hat and cane on the table as a matter of course: a person who had known no better might have concluded that the visitor was Kenilworth himself. But to Kenny, as they called him behind his back, the anteroom lackeys were much less attentive than they were to this young man.
“My real brother-in-law,” said Hurstmanceaux to himself, with a vexed frown upon his brows and a little laugh which people would have called cynical upon his lips. He did not love Kenilworth, but young Lord Brancepeth he abhorred.
CHAPTER VI.
“I met the Miser: how has he been to-day? Rating you, eh?” said Lord Brancepeth when he had been ten minutes or more ensconced in the cosiest corner by the boudoir fire. He was a very well-featured and well-built young man, with a dark oval face, pensive brows, and great dreamy dark brown eyes; his physiognomy, which was poetic and melancholy, did not accord with his conversation, which was slipshod and slangy, or his life which was idiotic, after the manner of his generation.