“I suppose the sword is hanging by a hair somewhere, and will drop when I least expect it,” he said to himself, in the hour of dark memories.
A chance allusion—some loving word of praise from his mother, the turn of a conversation, the plot of a play or a novel—would sometimes stir the dark waters of memory; but he did his best to forget, since there was nothing that he could do to atone; and he tried to convince himself that it was all the better for humanity at large that there was one reprobate less in the world.
This had been his temper for the last year or so, as memory lost something of its vivid colouring; and he had come to take that act of his in Venice as part and parcel of his life and character.
He bore himself gaily enough in this Christmas holiday at Redwold Towers, and Lady Hartley declared that he was the life and soul of her house-party.
“You have not such a passion for field-sports as the rest of the men,” she said. “One may hope to be favoured with your society for an occasional hour between breakfast and dinner, while those other wretches troop off in their horrid thick boots before I come downstairs in the morning, and I hear no more of them till dinner, unless I go with the luncheon cart.”
“I’m afraid my superiority must be put down to advancing years and growing laziness. I never was so good a shot as Hubert, and I have never been as keen a sportsman.”
“Perhaps that is because you have spent so much of your holiday life on the Continent. Hubert would be miserable if he were asked to spend a winter out of the British Isles, unless he were pig-sticking in India, or fishing in Canada, or hunting lions in Africa. He cannot get on without killing things. You are not like that. You have no thirst for blood.”
“No,” answered Jack, with a laugh; “I am not great at killing things, though I am just English enough to think poorly of the straightest run if it doesn’t end in blood.”
“Oh, of course, I know you can ride, and that you have a proper English love of hunting and shooting, but you don’t give your life up to sport and farming as Hubert does. You have only to look at his boots, and you can understand his life. Such an array of bluchers, tops, brogues, waterproof fishing boots and dreadful hobnailed, broad-toed things, that look like instruments of torture—as if they had been modelled upon the boot that one reads of under the Plantagenets and Tudors. People talk of writing as an index of character. I would rather see a man’s boots than his penmanship if I wanted to know what kind of man he was.”
“And you put me down as a single-soled, effeminate person?” said Jack; whereat there was a laugh from the house-party, sitting cosily round the morning-room fire, with the exception of one industrious matron who sat by the window, toiling at an early English counterpane which required to be worked upon a frame.
“No, no. I don’t consider you womanish. You would never sink into the useful family friend, or the tame cat, even if you were to remain a bachelor all your life. But your boots are more human than Hubert’s; and you are fond of art, and books, and music, for which I fear he cares very little.”
“He cares for something much better,” said Vansittart. “He cares for humanity, and is always thinking how he can improve the condition of the people who are dependent upon him. His cottages at Hartley are models of all that cottages should be, and there is not a good point about them that he has not thought out for himself.”
“Yes, he is always his own architect, and he has really some very good notions, though he is not as picturesque as I should like him to be in his ideas. The cottages about here may not be as commodious as ours in Yorkshire, but they are ever so much prettier—dear old cottages, more than half roof, and with the quaintest casements.”
“And very little light or air inside, I dare say; capital cottages for the landscape, but not so agreeable for the folks inside.”
The party in the morning-room consisted of the three Miss Champernownes, daughters of a Cornish baronet, all three handsome, stylish, accomplished, everything in short that Mrs. Vansittart would have approved in a daughter-in-law; Mrs. Baddington, the lady of the counterpane, who was so completely absorbed in her needlework that she might as well have stopped at her own fireside; but as her husband, Major Baddington, was a good shot and a pleasant companion, the lady’s inoffensive dullness was tolerated in country houses.
The other ladies present were Mrs. Vansittart and a Miss Green, a young lady who gave herself airs on the strength of her people being the Greens—the Greens of Peddlington—in whose particular case the name of Green was supposed to rank with Guelph or Ghibelline. Miss Green was plain, but clever, and was as boastful of her plainness as of her good old name. Her people were rich, and she had inherited an independent fortune from a bachelor uncle, who had bequeathed his wealth to her with an embargo against marriage with any man—less than a Peer—who should refuse to assume the name of Green. And even in the case of her marriage with a Peer, it was ordained that her second son should be called Green—by letters patent—and should inherit the Green wealth, strictly tied up in the case of the heiress.
Miss Green was economical to meanness—perhaps with some dim idea of enriching that hypothetical scion of nobility—and was proud of her economy. Her chief delight in the metropolis was to go long distances—generally in an omnibus—in quest of cheapness; and she was a scourge to all the young matrons of her acquaintance by her
