Twice or thrice in a week, in the earliest morning, the poor mother

went for her sins and saw the poor invalid. Sometimes he laughed at her

(and his laughter was more pitiful than to hear him cry); sometimes she

found the brilliant dandy diplomatist of the Congress of Vienna

dragging about a child's toy, or nursing the keeper's baby's doll.

Sometimes he knew her and Father Mole, her director and companion;

oftener he forgot her, as he had done wife, children, love, ambition,

vanity. But he remembered his dinner-hour, and used to cry if his

wine-and-water was not strong enough.

It was the mysterious taint of the blood; the poor mother had brought

it from her own ancient race. The evil had broken out once or twice in

the father's family, long before Lady Steyne's sins had begun, or her

fasts and tears and penances had been offered in their expiation. The

pride of the race was struck down as the first-born of Pharaoh. The

dark mark of fate and doom was on the threshold--the tall old

threshold surmounted by coronets and caned heraldry.

The absent lord's children meanwhile prattled and grew on quite

unconscious that the doom was over them too. First they talked of

their father and devised plans against his return. Then the name of

the living dead man was less frequently in their mouth--then not

mentioned at all. But the stricken old grandmother trembled to think

that these too were the inheritors of their father's shame as well as

of his honours, and watched sickening for the day when the awful

ancestral curse should come down on them.

This dark presentiment also haunted Lord Steyne. He tried to lay the

horrid bedside ghost in Red Seas of wine and jollity, and lost sight of

it sometimes in the crowd and rout of his pleasures. But it always

came back to him when alone, and seemed to grow more threatening with

years. "I have taken your son," it said, "why not you? I may shut you

up in a prison some day like your son George. I may tap you on the

head to-morrow, and away go pleasure and honours, feasts and beauty,

friends, flatterers, French cooks, fine horses and houses--in exchange

for a prison, a keeper, and a straw mattress like George Gaunt's." And

then my lord would defy the ghost which threatened him, for he knew of

a remedy by which he could baulk his enemy.

So there was splendour and wealth, but no great happiness perchance,

behind the tall caned portals of Gaunt House with its smoky coronets

and ciphers. The feasts there were of the grandest in London, but

there was not overmuch content therewith, except among the guests who

sat at my lord's table. Had he not been so great a Prince very few

possibly would have visited him; but in Vanity Fair the sins of very

great personages are looked at indulgently. "Nous regardons a deux

fois" (as the French lady said) before we condemn a person of my lord's

undoubted quality. Some notorious carpers and squeamish moralists

might be sulky with Lord Steyne, but they were glad enough to come when

he asked them.




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