“A hard-up coronet, do you mean? A coronet that wanted regilding.”
“No, sir. All those go to America. My coronet was well provided for—but it was not to be,” with a faint sigh. “I could not throw Hubert over. He was so ridiculously fond of me.”
“Was? Is, I hope,” said Jack, this retrospective survey of a girl’s career being made one afternoon in the snowy Christmas week, as Jack and his sister tramped home with the shooters, after a day on the hills.
“Yes, he still adores me, poor fellow, though he has found me out ever so long ago.”
“Found you out—how?”
“Oh, he has found that I am frivolous and selfish, and utterly worthless, from the socialist’s point of view. He has found out that although I am fond of pretty cottages and cottage gardens, I don’t care much about the cottagers, and that I never know what to say to them. He has found out that I haven’t the interests of the poor really at heart. In short, he has found that I am a thoroughbred Tory instead of a hotheaded Radical, as he is. I’m afraid we ought never to have married. It is like trying to join fire and water.”
“Oh, but I think you manage to get on capitally together, in spite of any difference in your political views. Indeed, I did not think you knew much about politics.”
“I don’t. I know hardly anything. I never read the debates, and my mind always wanders when people are talking politics; but my Conservatism and Hubert’s Radicalism enter into everything—into our way with servants, into our treatment of our friends, into our ideas about dress, manners, church. I cannot even shake hands with a cottager as he does. I have tried to imitate him, but I can’t achieve that unconscious air of equality which comes so natural to him. And do what I will I can’t help feeling ashamed of that great-grandfather of his who began life in Sheffield as a poor lad, and who invented something—some quite small thing, it seems to me—and so laid the foundations of the Hartley wealth. That is a little bit of family history which I should so like everybody to forget, while poor Hubert is quite proud of it. At Hartley Manor he loves to show strangers the great-grandfather’s portrait in his working clothes—just as he looked when he invented the thing, whatever it was.”
“You would not have him ashamed of the founder of his fortune. I have heard of a house in which the portrait of the good man who made the family wealth has a looking-glass in front of it, so that the will which ordained that that portrait should hang on one particular panel in the dining-room as long as the family mansion stood may be kept to the letter, while it is broken in the spirit. But this was a particularly irksome case, for the good man had made his money out of tallow, and had been painted with a pound of mould candles in each hand. Think of that, Maud! Fustian and corduroy are paintable enough; but not even Herkomer could make anything out of two bunches of tallow candles.”
“I wish Hubert would let me hang a fine Venetian glass in front of his worthy great-grandfather. However, since he himself is a gentleman, I suppose I ought to be satisfied,” said Maud; “I don’t believe there is a finer gentleman in England than my husband, Radical as he is.”
Vansittart’s sister was perfectly happy in her married life. She had a husband who petted and indulged her, with inexhaustible good humour, and who thought her the most enchanting of women, with infinite capacities for soaring to a higher level than she had yet attained. She had as much money as ever she cared to spend, and a house in which she was allowed to do what she liked, so long as she did not trample on the rights and privileges of the old servants from Hartley Manor, who had been dominant there since Hubert’s infancy; servants whose proud boast it was to have been associated with every circumstance of their master’s life, from the cutting of his first tooth to the bringing home of his bride. It is strange what Conservative ways these Radicals sometimes have in the bosoms of their families.
Sir Hubert Hartley was not like David, ruddy and fair to see. He was a small, dark man, who looked as if some of the original Sheffield smoke, the smoke inhaled by the inventor day after day for half a century, had given its hue to his complexion. He was wiry, and well built, active, energetic, a good shot, a good horseman, a lover of field sports and wild animals, loving, after the sportsman’s fashion, even the creatures he destroyed, curious about their habits, keen in his admiration of their strength and beauty. For the rest, he was a man of widest beneficence, charitable, hospitable, and he was a man whom the better-born Jack Vansittart loved and honoured.
They were about the same age, and had been at Eton and Oxford together, and Jack knew his friend by heart. He could have chosen no better husband for his sister; he could have chosen no man he would have preferred to call his brother-in-law. It seemed to him sometimes that he could have hardly liked a brother better than he liked Hubert Hartley.
Vansittart was still a gentleman at leisure. He had coquetted with politics, and had allowed himself to be spoken of as a young man who might prove an acquisition to the Conservative party, but he had not allowed himself to be nominated for any constituency. “The party is strong enough to get on without me,” he said; “I’ll wait till the General Election,
