“Well,” said Lady Arabella, very slowly, “I don’t think he does.” If the squire did gamble he must have done it very slyly, for he rarely went away from Greshamsbury, and certainly very few men looking like gamblers were in the habit of coming thither as guests. “I don’t think he does gamble.” Lady Arabella put her emphasis on the word gamble, as though her husband, if he might perhaps be charitably acquitted of that vice, was certainly guilty of every other known in the civilised world.
“I know he used,” said Lady de Courcy, looking very wise, and rather suspicious. She certainly had sufficient domestic reasons for disliking the propensity; “I know he used; and when a man begins, he is hardly ever cured.”
“Well, if he does, I don’t know it,” said the Lady Arabella.
“The money, my dear, must go somewhere. What excuse does he give when you tell him you want this and that—all the common necessaries of life, that you have always been used to?”
“He gives no excuse; sometimes he says the family is so large.”
“Nonsense! Girls cost nothing; there’s only Frank, and he can’t have cost anything yet. Can he be saving money to buy back Boxall Hill?”
“Oh no!” said the Lady Arabella, quickly. “He is not saving anything; he never did, and never will save, though he is so stingy to me. He is hard pushed for money, I know that.”
“Then where has it gone?” said the Countess de Courcy, with a look of stern decision.
“Heaven only knows! Now, Augusta is to be married. I must of course have a few hundred pounds. You should have heard how he groaned when I asked him for it. Heaven only knows where the money goes!” And the injured wife wiped a piteous tear from her eye with her fine dress cambric handkerchief. “I have all the sufferings and privations of a poor man’s wife, but I have none of the consolations. He has no confidence in me; he never tells me anything; he never talks to me about his affairs. If he talks to any one it is to that horrid doctor.”
“What, Dr Thorne?” Now the Countess de Courcy hated Dr Thorne with a holy hatred.
“Yes; Dr Thorne. I believe that he knows everything; and advises everything, too. Whatever difficulties poor Gresham may have, I do believe Dr Thorne has brought them about. I do believe it, Rosina.”
“Well, that is surprising. Mr Gresham, with all his faults, is a gentleman; and how he can talk about his affairs with a low apothecary like that, I, for one, cannot imagine. Lord de Courcy has not always been to me all that he should have been; far from it.” And Lady de Courcy thought over in her mind injuries of a much graver description than any that her sister-in-law had ever suffered; “but I have never known anything like that at Courcy Castle. Surely Umbleby knows all about it, doesn’t he?”
“Not half so much as the doctor,” said Lady Arabella.
The countess shook her head slowly; the idea of Mr Gresham, a country gentleman of good estate like him, making a confidant of a country doctor was too great a shock for her nerves; and for a while she was constrained to sit silent before she could recover herself.
“One thing at any rate is certain, Arabella,” said the countess, as soon as she found herself again sufficiently composed to offer counsel in a properly dictatorial manner. “One thing at any rate is certain; if Mr Gresham be involved so deeply as you say, Frank has but one duty before him. He must marry money. The heir of fourteen thousand a year may indulge himself in looking for blood, as Mr Gresham did, my dear”—it must be understood that there was very little compliment in this, as the Lady Arabella had always conceived herself to be a beauty—”or for beauty, as some men do,” continued the countess, thinking of the choice that the present Earl de Courcy had made; “but Frank must marry money. I hope he will understand this early; do make him understand this before he makes a fool of himself; when a man thoroughly understands this, when he knows what his circumstances require, why, the matter becomes easy to him. I hope that Frank understands that he has no alternative. In his position he must marry money.”
But, alas! alas! Frank Gresham had already made a fool of himself.
“Well, my boy, I wish you joy with all my heart,” said the Honourable John, slapping his cousin on the back, as he walked round to the stableyard with him before dinner, to inspect a setter puppy of peculiarly fine breed which had been sent to Frank as a birthday present. “I wish I were an elder son; but we can’t all have that luck.”
“Who wouldn’t sooner be the younger son of an earl than the eldest son of a plain squire?” said Frank, wishing to say something civil in return for his cousin’s civility.
“I wouldn’t for one,” said the Honourable John. “What chance have I? There’s Porlock as strong as a horse; and then George comes next. And the governor’s good for these twenty years.” And the young man sighed as he reflected what small hope there was that all those who were nearest and dearest to him should die out of his way, and leave him to the sweet enjoyment of an earl’s coronet and fortune. “Now, you’re sure of your game some day; and as you’ve no brothers, I suppose the squire’ll let you do pretty well what you like. Besides, he’s not so strong as my governor, though he’s younger.”
Frank had never looked at his fortune in this light before, and was so slow and green that he was not much delighted at the prospect now that it was offered to him. He had always, however, been taught to look to his cousins, the de Courcys, as men with whom it would be very expedient that he should be intimate; he therefore showed no offence, but changed the conversation.
“Shall you hunt with the Barsetshire this season, John? I hope you will; I shall.”
“Well, I don’t know. It’s very slow. It’s all tillage here, or else woodland. I rather fancy I shall go to Leicestershire when the partridge-shooting is over. What sort of a lot do you mean to come out with, Frank?”
Frank became a little red as he answered, “Oh, I shall have two,” he said; “that is, the mare I have had these two years, and the horse my father gave me this morning.”
“What! only those two? and the mare is nothing more than a pony.”
“She is fifteen hands,” said Frank, offended.
“Well, Frank, I certainly would not stand that,” said the Honourable John. “What, go out before the county with one untrained horse and a pony; and you the heir to Greshamsbury!”
“I’ll have him so trained before November,” said Frank, “that nothing in Barsetshire shall stop him. Peter says”—Peter was the Greshamsbury stud-groom—”that he tucks up his hind legs beautifully.”
“But who the deuce would think of going to work with one horse; or two either, if you insist on calling the old pony a huntress? I’ll put you up to a trick, my lad: if you stand that you’ll stand anything; and if you don’t mean to go in leading-strings all your life, now is the time to show it. There’s young Baker—Harry Baker, you know—he came of age last year, and he has as pretty a string of nags as any one would wish to set eyes on; four hunters and a hack. Now, if old Baker has four thousand a year it’s every shilling he has got.”
This was true, and Frank Gresham, who in the morning had been made so happy by his father’s present of a horse, began to feel that hardly enough had been done for him. It was true that Mr Baker had only four thousand a year; but it was also true that he had no other child than Harry Baker; that he had no great establishment to keep up; that he owed a shilling to no one; and, also, that he was a great fool in encouraging a mere boy to ape all the caprices of a man of wealth. Nevertheless, for a moment, Frank Gresham did feel that, considering his position, he was being treated rather unworthily.
“Take the matter in your own hands, Frank,” said the Honourable John, seeing the impression that he had made. “Of course the governor knows very well that you won’t put up with such a stable as that. Lord bless you! I have heard that when he married my aunt, and that was when he was about your age, he had the best stud in the whole county; and then he was in