The Duke's Children eBook

The Major thought about it much that night, and was thinking about it still when he awoke on the next morning.  He would like to make Lord Silverbridge pay for his late insolence.  It would answer his purpose to make a little money,—­as he told himself,—­in any honest way.  At the present moment he was in want of money, and on looking into his affairs declared to himself that he certainly impoverished himself by his devotion to Lord Silverbridge’s interests.  At breakfast on the following morning he endeavoured to bring his friend back on to the subject.  But the Captain was cross, rather than oracular.  ‘Everybody,’ he said, ’ought to know his own business.’  He wasn’t going to meddle or make.  What he had said had been taken amiss.  This was hard upon Tifto, who had taken nothing amiss.

‘Square be d-!’ There was a great deal in the lesson there enunciated which demanded consideration.  Hitherto the Major had fought his battles with a certain adherence to squareness.  If his angles had not all been perfect angles, still there had always been an attempt at geometrical accuracy.  He might now and then have told a lie about a horse—­but who that deals in horses has not done that?  He had been alive to the value of underhand information from racing-stables, but who won’t use a tip if he can get it?  He had lied about the expense of his hounds, in order to enhance the subscription of his members.  Those were things which everybody did in his line.  But Green had meant something beyond this.

As far as he could see out in the world at large, nobody was square.  You had to keep your mouth shut, or your teeth would be stolen out of it.  He didn’t look into a paper without seeing that on all sides of him men had abandoned the idea of squareness.  Chairmen, directors, members of Parliament, ambassadors,—­all the world, as he told himself,—­were trying to get on by their wits.  He didn’t see why he should be more square than anybody else.  Why hadn’t Silverbridge taken him down to Scotland for the grouse?

CHAPTER 37

Grex

Far away from all known places, in the northern limit of the Craven district, on the borders of Westmoreland but in Yorkshire, there stands a large rambling most picturesque old house called Grex.  The people around call it the Castle, but it is not a castle.  It is an old brick building supposed to have been erected in the days of James the First, having oriel windows, twisted chimneys, long galleries, gable ends, a quadrangle of which the house surrounds three sides, terraces, sundials, and fish-ponds.  But it is sadly out of repair as to be altogether unfit for the residence of a gentleman and his family.  It stands not in a park, for the land about it is divided into paddocks by low stone walls, but in the midst of lovely scenery, the ground rising all round it in low irregular hills or fells, and close to it, a quarter of a mile from the back of the house, there is a small dark lake, not serenely lovely as are some of the lakes in Westmoreland, but attractive by the darkness of its waters and the gloom of the woods around it.