Anyhow we might have arranged matters right along. I could have entered into the possession of my ancestral estates straight away, and we'd all have been as happy as the day was long. But that's where the trouble is; the mistakes you make at first, through ignorance, they're hard to repair. Sometimes bitter hard.
As things were, the game was going to be a lot more difficult, both for me and Smith. Though Smith, just at present, didn't know. In the first place I should have to learn, with a quantity of surprise which was on so large a scale as to be altogether beyond the power of words to describe, how he'd been deluded by a two-faced scoundrel. I didn't die. 'No. The Marquis is alive. My dearest dears, I'm he! That wasn't the head of the house of Twickenham you saw sink to rest. Certainly not! The tears you shed--I didn't notice any, but there might have been a leakage--were all clean thrown away. The gentleman you have boxed up--well, I shouldn't be surprised if they had to open the coffin to find out who he was.' When they did find out I'd laugh. I wonder if Smith would join me. Anyhow he'd have the straight griffin that if he wasn't on my side trouble for him was only beginning. Recognise the rightful Marquis, debts would be paid, and there'd be a nice little yearly income. Be too nastily inquisitive, and it would be clearly shown to Mr. Smith that he was the kind of felon with whom the law is rarely gentle.
Now it's an odd thing that the chief difficulty which confronted me was one of which most men would have thought nothing at all. I'd a wife and children. They're possessions of which plenty of men would be glad to get relieved. I didn't happen to be one of them. I've tried all sorts of things. I've had plenty of money. I've been in some queer corners of the world, and seen some queer capers, and done them. There are games I can play, at which no man can hold his own with me; nor yet begin. But there's only one thing which doesn't taste nasty in my mouth. And that's my wife. She's the only thing I ever came across that was quite worth having; and, my God, she is. It's a complete illustration of life's little ironies that I should have been the man to have got her; for though she doesn't know it, inside and out we're as unlike each other as the poles are far asunder. During the last six years it had been one of my chief ends and aims not to let her find it out. And she hadn't--to that hour.
Now what was going to happen? In this game which I was starting on, where did she come in?
If I'd laid myself out to play it on different lines from the first, she might have been the Marchioness of Twickenham. Jimmy, when his turn came, might have been a peer of the realm. And yet I didn't know. That would have been to have smirched her with my brush. If I ever was bowled out, which was a prospect I always had to face, they'd possibly try to make out, and would certainly think, that she'd been in the know with me. That would be as death to Mary.
The more I thought it over the more it seemed to me that that cock wouldn't fight. Apart from the fact that I meant, as the Marquis of Twickenham, to disavow all connection with Mr. Montagu Babbacombe, who had behaved so basely in deluding Mr. Howarth, it was obvious to me that it would still be the better policy to keep Mary out of my ditches, and without the knowledge of their existence. I always had lived, as all men do, and, I suppose, most women, a double, treble, or quadruple life, as circumstances required. For a little arrangement of that sort, in the future, I should be better placed than ever. I only had to remove the lady from Little Olive Street, and ask her to acquaint no one with her new address. She need never know me as anything but James. As the Marquis I should be entitled to my little eccentricities; his lordship always had indulged in them. And after an absence of fifteen years, no one could cavil if I still continued to disappear whenever the humour took me. Mr. and Mrs. Merrett would have a better time together than they had ever had before.
CHAPTER XXII
[A MARQUIS IN FACT]
Since the Marquis of Twickenham was alive I thought it would be just as well to announce the fact in the grand style. So one morning, having arrived at the conclusion that it was about time that the announcement should be made, I paid up what was owing for those rooms in Clifford Street, Dalston, had my portmanteau put on the top of a cab, and having put myself inside, drove off to Twickenham House in St. James's Square. It was a good horse, and as it took me along as a horse ought to, from the tingle at the tips of my fingers, and the tickle at the balls of my feet, which made me feel I'd like to do something high-toned in the way of fancy dancing, I knew that I was going to enjoy myself.
Cab stopped; I stepped out, overpaid cabby, got in some work on the knocker and the bell. Door opened and there was a young six-footer, in a lovely livery, beautiful silk stockings, and with a teaspoonful of flour on his manly head, looking down at me. I just walked past him as if he wasn't there, tipped my thumb over my shoulder and remarked,