He rose defensively.
"Let me explain."
Lady Caroline quivered with repressed emotion. This masterly woman
had not lost control of herself, but her aristocratic calm had
seldom been so severely tested. As Reggie had surmised, she had read
the report of the proceedings in the evening paper in the train, and
her world had been reeling ever since. Caesar, stabbed by Brutus,
could scarcely have experienced a greater shock. The other members
of her family had disappointed her often. She had become inured to
the spectacle of her brother working in the garden in corduroy
trousers and in other ways behaving in a manner beneath the dignity
of an Earl of Marshmoreton. She had resigned herself to the innate
flaw in the character of Maud which had allowed her to fall in love
with a nobody whom she had met without an introduction. Even Reggie
had exhibited at times democratic traits of which she thoroughly
disapproved. But of her nephew Percy she had always been sure. He
was solid rock. He, at least, she had always felt, would never do
anything to injure the family prestige. And now, so to speak, "Lo,
Ben Adhem's name led all the rest." In other words, Percy was the
worst of the lot. Whatever indiscretions the rest had committed, at
least they had never got the family into the comic columns of the
evening papers. Lord Marshmoreton might wear corduroy trousers and
refuse to entertain the County at garden parties and go to bed with
a book when it was his duty to act as host at a formal ball; Maud
might give her heart to an impossible person whom nobody had ever
heard of; and Reggie might be seen at fashionable restaurants with
pugilists; but at any rate evening paper poets had never written
facetious verses about their exploits. This crowning degradation had
been reserved for the hitherto blameless Percy, who, of all the
young men of Lady Caroline's acquaintance, had till now appeared to
have the most scrupulous sense of his position, the most rigid
regard for the dignity of his great name. Yet, here he was, if the
carefully considered reports in the daily press were to be believed,
spending his time in the very spring-tide of his life running about
London like a frenzied Hottentot, brutally assaulting the police.
Lady Caroline felt as a bishop might feel if he suddenly discovered
that some favourite curate had gone over to the worship of Mumbo
Jumbo.
"Explain?" she cried. "How can you explain? You--my nephew, the
heir to the title, behaving like a common rowdy in the streets of
London . . . your name in the papers . . . "