This was a question which Roger found it almost impossible to answer. If he had spoken his thoughts he would have declared that Sir Felix had reached an age at which, if a man will go headlong to destruction, he must go headlong to destruction. Thinking as he did of his cousin he could see no possible salvation for him. 'Perhaps I should take him abroad,' he said.
'Would he be better abroad than here?'
'He would have less opportunity for vice, and fewer means of running you into debt.'
Lady Carbury, as she turned this counsel in her mind, thought of all the hopes which she had indulged,--her literary aspirations, her Tuesday evenings, her desire for society, her Brounes, her Alfs, and her Bookers, her pleasant drawing-room, and the determination which she had made that now in the afternoon of her days she would become somebody in the world. Must she give it all up and retire to the dreariness of some French town because it was no longer possible that she should live in London with such a son as hers? There seemed to be a cruelty in this beyond all cruelties that she had hitherto endured. This was harder even than those lies which had been told of her when almost in fear of her life she had run from her husband's house. But yet she must do even this if in no other way she and her son could be together. 'Yes,' she said, 'I suppose it would be so. I only wish that I might die, so that were an end of it.'
'He might go out to one of the Colonies,' said Roger.
'Yes;--be sent away that he might kill himself with drink in the bush, and so be got rid of. I have heard of that before. Wherever he goes I shall go.'
As the reader knows, Roger Carbury had not latterly held this cousin of his in much esteem. He knew her to be worldly and he thought her to be unprincipled. But now, at this moment, her exceeding love for the son whom she could no longer pretend to defend, wiped out all her sins. He forgot the visit made to Carbury under false pretences, and the Melmottes, and all the little tricks which he had detected, in his appreciation of an affection which was pure and beautiful. 'If you like to let your house for a period,' he said, 'mine is open to you.'
'But, Felix?'
'You shall take him there. I am all alone in the world. I can make a home for myself at the cottage. It is empty now. If you think that would save you you can try it for six months.'