He surveyed her with a kind of admiring sarcasm.
"No. I'm only an uncle,"--he said--"Uncle of the boy that shot himself this morning for her sake!"
Miss Herbert uttered a sharp cry. She was startled and horrified.
"What!... Jack?... Shot himself?... Oh, how dreadful!--I'm--I'm sorry--!"
"You're not!"--retorted Gwent--"So don't pretend. No one is sorry for anybody else nowadays. There's no time. And no inclination. Jack was always a fool--perhaps he's best out of it. I've just seen him--dead. He's better-looking so than when alive."
She sprang up from her rocking chair in a blaze of indignation.
"You are brutal!" she exclaimed, with a half sob--"Positively brutal!"
"Not at all!" he answered, composedly--"Only commonplace. It is you advanced women that are brutal,--not we left-behind men. Jack was a fool, I say--he staked the whole of his game on Morgana Royal, and he lost. That was the last straw. If he could have married her he would have cleared all his debts over and over--and that's what he had hoped for. The disappointment was too much for him."
"But--didn't he LOVE her?" Lydia Herbert put the question almost imperatively.
Mr. Sam Gwent raised his eyebrows quizzically. "I guess you came out of the Middle Ages!" he observed--"What's 'love'? Did you ever know a woman with millions of money who got 'loved'? Not a bit of it! Her MONEY is loved--but not herself. She's the encumbrance to the cash."
"Then--then--you mean to tell me Jack was only after the money--?"
"What else should he be after? The woman? There are thousands of women,--all to be had for the asking--they pitch themselves at men headlong--no hesitation or modesty about them nowadays! Jack's asking would never have been refused by any one of them. But the millions of Morgana Royal are not to be got every day!"
Miss Herbert's rather thin lips tightened into a close line,--she flicked some light tear-drops away from her eyes with a handkerchief as fine as a cobweb delicately perfumed, and stood silently looking out on the view from the verandah.
"You see," pursued Gwent, in his cold, deliberate accents, "Jack was ruined financially. And he has all but ruined ME. Now he has taken himself out of the way with a pistol shot, and left me to face the music for him. Morgana Royal was his only chance. She led him on,--she certainly led him on. He thought he had her,--then--just as he was about to pin the butterfly to his specimen card, away it flew!"