Next day the bodies of the Duke and the sailor were found in a little cove at the top of the bay, and hard by the two a book in three volumes, bound with a string which was chafed and broken at the loose end. On opening these volumes they were found to be "The Duke of Fenwick: a Novel. By Charles Augustus Cheyne." The facts that the book had been found near the body of the dead nobleman, and that it had something to do with a duke, led the simple people who found it to believe that it had only come ashore from the wreck, and that it was in some way or other connected with the person of the late Duke, so they sent it up to the Castle in the same carriage with the body.
In that same carriage, on the day before, the present Duke and the bruised and battered Cheyne had been driven from the place where they had landed to Silverview Castle, above Silver Bay, the residence of the Duke of Shropshire.
CHAPTER XX.
[FAME.]
The little household in Knightsbridge, where Marion Durrant lived with her invalid aunt, Miss Traynor, did not breakfast early. It was very rarely the teapot found its way to the table until ten o'clock. Miss Traynor was one of those invalids who suffer from sleeplessness, together with other maladies; and it was often three, four, or five o'clock in the morning before she closed her eyes.
Miss Traynor was old-fashioned and kindly, with none of the irritability or exactingness of the invalid about her. She was often in great pain; but at such times she wished to be alone. She was never irritable or capricious. She always behaved in her own house as though she were a guest, as far as herself was concerned. She hated ringing bells for the servant, and tried to prevent Marion doing a number of little services which many women in health exact of those around them.
But she was most decidedly old-fashioned. She had a great number of settled notions, notions acquired long ago, and which nothing in the world could shake. All the eloquence or argument in the world would not move her on any subject she had made up her mind about twenty or thirty years ago. She had an antipathy to new theories, new places, new people. She was an enthusiastic admirer of Church and State. She considered all Liberals murderers and regicides at heart, not that she had even a dim idea of what a Liberal was. Personally she would not have hurt the meanest of God's creatures, but she could have read with lively satisfaction that all the Liberals and Radicals had been drowned, provided all detail were omitted, and a bishop had something to do with the matter.
She looked on clergymen of the Church of England with the greatest respect, and she considered bishops infallible and impeccable. She did not put the least faith in missions to savages. She had a mean opinion of savages, and did not think them worth the trouble taken with them by pious folk of a certain way of thinking.
Her father before her had taken in The Times, and she took it in too; not that she read much of it, but that she thought every staid respectable house ought to have The Times; and that, after the Church and State, The Times was the most important institution in the country. She had no comprehensive notion of what the Church was, and her idea of the State was The Court Circular. But in what way The Times contributed to the welfare of the country, she had no conception whatever. She was always quite sure that whatever The Times said must infallibly be right. Any suggestion that, possibly, a conflict or difference of any kind could arise between these three, she would have treated with merciless scorn. There were the Church, State, and Times; and as long as they went on, England must continue to be the greatest, most pious, and most successful country under the sun.
After the Church, State, and Times the institution which claimed her greatest respect was the Peerage of England. She would cheerfully have allowed art and commerce to die if we might only retain our old nobility. She had no social ambition for herself. She knew she was not of the metal peers are made of. If a lord had spoken to her, she would have felt he was doing something derogatory to his order. She was a firm believer in caste, and did not wish those above her to come down any more than she wished herself to go up.