'There is no harm done,' he said kindly. 'A glass of wine with you,
sir.' Mr. Fishwick in his surprise and nervousness, dropped his hat, picked
it up, and dropped it again; finally he let it lie while he filled his
glass. His hand shook; he was unaccountably agitated. But he managed to
acquit himself fairly, and with a 'Greatly honoured, Sir George.
Good-night, gentlemen,' he disappeared.
'What is his business with Lord Chatham?' Dr. Addington asked rather
coldly. It was plain that he did not approve of Sir George's
condescension.
'I have no notion,' Soane answered, yawning. 'But he has got a very
pretty girl with him. Whether she is laying traps for Dunborough--' 'The viscountess's son?' 'Just so--I cannot say. But that is the old harridan's account of it.' 'Is she here too?' 'Lord, yes; and they had no end of a quarrel downstairs. There is a
story about the girl and Dunborough. I'll tell it you some time.' 'I began to think--he was here on your business,' said the doctor.
'He? Oh, no,' Sir George answered without suspicion, and turned to look
for his candlestick. 'I suppose that he is in the case I am in--wants
something and comes to the fountain of honour to get it.' And bidding the other good-night, he went to bed; not to sleep, but to
lie awake and reckon and calculate, and add a charge here to interest
there, and set both against income, and find nothing remain.
He had sneered at the old home because it had been in his family only so
many generations. But there is this of evil in an old house--it is bad
to live in, but worse to part from. Sir George, straining his eyes in
the darkness, saw the long avenue of elms and the rooks' nests, and the
startled birds circling overhead; and at the end of the vista the wide
doorway, aed. temp. Jac. 1--saw it all more lucidly than he had seen
it since the September morning when he traversed it, a boy of fourteen,
with his first gun on his arm. Well, it was gone; but he was Sir George,
macaroni and fashionable, arbiter of elections at White's, and great at
Almack's, more powerful in his sphere than a belted earl!
But, then, that was gone too, with the money--and--and what was left? Sir George
groaned and turned on his pillow and thought of Bland and Fanny
Braddock. He wondered if any one had ever left the Castle by the suicide
door, and, to escape his thoughts, lit a candle and read 'La Belle
Héloïse,' which he had in his mail.