'Those things never belong to the past,' said the young man. 'If it were any other kind of taint--profligacy--madness, even--the story of a duel that went very near murder--a runaway wife--a rebellious son--a cruel husband. I have heard such stories hinted at in the records of families. But our story means disgrace. I seldom see strangers putting their heads together at the club without fancying they are telling each other about my grandfather, and pointing me out as the grandson and heir of a thief.'
'Why should I stoop to sophistication with you, my friend. Dishonesty is dishonesty all the world over; and to plunder Rajahs on a large scale is no less vile than to pick a pocket on Ludgate Hill.'
'Nothing was ever proved against your grandfather.'
'No, he died in the nick of time, and the inquiry was squashed, thanks to the Angersthorpe interest, and my grandmother's cleverness. But if he had lived a few weeks longer England would have rung with the story of his profligacy and dishonour. Some people say he committed suicide in order to escape the inquiry; but I have heard my mother emphatically deny this. My father told her that he had often talked with the people who kept the little inn where his father died, and they were clear enough in their assertion that the death was a natural death--the sudden collapse of an exhausted constitution.'
'Was it on account of this scandal that your father spent the best part of his life away from England?' Hammond asked, feeling that it was a relief to Maulevrier to talk about this secret burden of his.
The young Earl was light-hearted and frivolous by nature, yet even he had his graver moments; and upon this subject of the old Maulevrier scandal he was peculiarly sensitive, perhaps all the more so because his grandmother had never allowed him to speak to her about it, had never satisfied his curiosity upon any details of that painful story.
'I have very little doubt it was so--though I wasn't old enough when he died to hear as much from his own lips. My father went straight from the University to Vienna, where he began his career in the diplomatic service, and where he soon afterwards married a dowerless English girl of good family. He went to Rio as first secretary, and died of fever within seven years of his marriage, leaving a widow and three babies, the youngest in long clothes. Mother and babies all came over to England, and were at once established at Fellside. I can remember the voyage--and I can remember my poor mother who never recovered the blow of my father's death, and who died in yonder house, after five years of broken health and broken spirits. We had no one but the dowager to look to as children--hardly another friend in the world. She did what she liked with us; she kept the girls as close as nuns, so _they_ have never heard a hint of the old history; no breach of scandal has reached _their_ ears. But she could not shut me up in a country house for ever, though she did succeed in keeping me away from a public school. The time came when I had to go to the University, and there I heard all that had been said about Lord Maulevrier. The men who told me about the old scandal in a friendly way pretended not to believe it; but one night, when I had got into a row at a wine-party with a tailor's son, he told me that if his father was a snip my grandfather was a thief, and so he thought himself the better bred of the two. I smashed his nose for him, but as it was a decided pug before the row began, that hardly squared the matter.'