‘It can’t be done, sir, at the price. I’d do a good deal to meet your wishes and that, and I don’t pretend to be more sentimental than my neighbours. But marrying is a serious sort of step, you know. One can’t cry off and pay forfeit, if one changes one’s mind a bit too late. Miss Willis is’——
Thus far Captain Denzil; but now Sir Sykes interrupted his son with an irritation unusual to him: ‘Miss Willis is a great deal too good for you, I am afraid. Indeed I trust to her sound sense to keep some order in your affairs, and prevent you from driving at too headlong a pace along the road to ruin. Of course her pretensions to pedigree are very slight compared with our own, if that be the obstacle in your way.’
‘Nobody cares much about ancient blood, in a woman at least, now-a-days,’ languidly replied Jasper. ‘She is lady enough to take the head of a dinner-table, or figure creditably in a London drawing-room, after a few weeks of training, and that’s as much as need be looked for. And I admit that Miss Willis is—very clever.’
Except in the case of an authoress, no one ever applies the epithet ‘Very clever’ to a lady save as a species of covert blame. Sir Sykes felt and looked uneasy as the words reached him.
‘If you have any personal objection’—— he began.
‘Not the least in the world,’ unceremoniously interrupted Jasper. ‘I’ll even stretch a point, and say I rather like the girl than otherwise. She’d go straight, I daresay, once the course was smooth and clear before her. But I do not think, father, you are treating me quite well. Carbery ought, you know it ought, to go in the direct line, as such properties do.’
‘I apprehend your meaning,’ returned Sir Sykes in his coldest tone, ‘to be that you resent as a grievance the fact that the estate is not entailed upon yourself. You should be more reasonable, and remember the singular circumstances under which I became master here.’
‘It was a grand coup!’ exclaimed the captain, with an envious little sigh. ‘Such a stroke of luck does not come twice to the same family.’
‘I got this great gift,’ pursued Sir Sykes, ‘from the hand of one who thought less of what he gave to me than of what, by making such a will, he took away from others. The old lord’s self-tormenting mind led him to exult, in the hopes that his testament extinguished, in the injury done to kith and kin.’
‘It was a sell for the De Veres,’ muttered Jasper; ‘they didn’t on the whole take it badly.’ He looked up as he spoke at the glimmering blazonry of the great stained-glass window, and realised, for the first time perhaps, the vexation which the caprice of the late lord of Carbery had inflicted on those of his own race and name.