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.