“I want you two to stick together,” said the old Marquis to his elder son, “and therefore I have not left Cyril anything of his own. He has your mother’s money, which will keep him from starvation, but for anything more he must come to you. He may have some consideration for your money, but he would be sure to speculate with anything that was in his own power.”
Caerleon found this utterance hard to reconcile with the high opinion his father had once expressed of Cyril’s shrewdness and worldly wisdom, and he also resented the arrangement as unfair to Cyril. What if he should desire to marry? Hence his eagerness to put matters on a more satisfactory footing.
“I am afraid that things will have to remain as they are just now,” he said; “but you may be sure that as soon as possible I shall do what I can for you.”
“Thanks, awfully,” yawned Cyril. “But what about the present? When you have succeeded in leaving yourself without any rest for the sole of your foot except your London lodgings, what do you mean to do?”
“What is there to do?” asked Caerleon. “I can do no good in the Lords, and I can’t stay in the Commons. They even take away from me the means of living on my own place——”
“And cultivating the higher faculties of your tenants, and making Llandiarmid a social centre for all the art and learning and enlightenment of the county,” said Cyril. “Well, granted all this, what then?”
“Let us go abroad,” said Caerleon, suddenly. “We haven’t had a prowl together for years, and we can sink our titles and live on the cheap.”
“By all means,” said Cyril. “Let us leave our ungrateful country, which presents our ancestors with dinner-services and swords of honour and statues and plate, which we don’t want and mustn’t sell, and makes us pay duty on them. The wide world is before us. Where shall we turn? I say, let us go to Kashmir and shoot mountain sheep, or Polar bears, or my lord the elephant, or anything we may come across.”
“Won’t do,” said Caerleon. “I should have you knocking up again, right away from all medical help. It must be somewhere nearer home.”
“Oh, let’s go to Bournemouth or Torquay, then. So cheerful, and so novel, and plenty of doctors.”