The Path Of Duty | Page 2

from telling everything; on the contrary, don't you see?

I.
His brilliant prospects dated from the death of his brother, who had no
children, had indeed steadily refused to marry. When I say brilliant
prospects, I mean the vision of the baronetcy, one of the oldest in
England, of a charming seventeenth-century house, with its park, in
Dorsetshire, and a property worth some twenty thousand a year. Such a
collection of items is still dazzling to me, even after what you would
call, I suppose, a familiarity with British grandeur. My husband is n't a
baronet (or we probably should n't be in London in December), and he
is far, alas, from having twenty thousand a year. The full enjoyment of
these luxuries, on Ambrose Tester's part, was dependent naturally, on
the death of his father, who was still very much to the fore at the time I
first knew the young man. The proof of it is the way he kept nagging at
his sons, as the younger used to say, on the question of taking a wife.
The nagging had been of no avail, as I have mentioned, with regard to
Francis, the elder, whose affections were centred (his brother himself
told me) on the winecup and the faro-table. He was not an exemplary or
edifying character, and as the heir to an honorable name and a fine

estate was very unsatisfactory indeed. It had been possible in those
days to put him into the army, but it was not possible to keep him there;
and he was still a very young man when it became plain that any
parental dream of a "career" for Frank Tester was exceedingly vain.
Old Sir Edmund had thought matrimony would perhaps correct him,
but a sterner process than this was needed, and it came to him one day
at Monaco--he was most of the time abroad--after an illness so short
that none of the family arrived in time. He was reformed altogether, he
was utterly abolished.
The second son, stepping into his shoes, was such an improvement that
it was impossible there should be much simulation of mourning. You
have seen him, you know what he is; there is very little mystery about
him. As I am not going to show this composition to you, there is no
harm in my writing here that he is--or at any rate he was--a remarkably
attractive man. I don't say this because he made love to me, but
precisely because he did n't. He was always in love with some one
else,--generally with Lady Vandeleur. You may say that in England
that usually does n't prevent; but Mr. Tester, though he had almost no
intermissions, did n't, as a general thing, have duplicates. He was not
provided with a second loved object, "under-studying," as they say, the
part. It was his practice to keep me accurately informed of the state of
his affections,--a matter about which he was never in the least vague.
When he was in love he knew it and rejoiced in it, and when by a
miracle he was not he greatly regretted it. He expatiated to me on the
charms of other persons, and this interested me much more than if he
had attempted to direct the conversation to my own, as regards which I
had no illusions. He has told me some singular things, and I think I may
say that for a considerable period my most valued knowledge of
English society was extracted from this genial youth. I suppose he
usually found me a woman of good counsel, for certain it is that he has
appealed to me for the light of wisdom in very extraordinary
predicaments. In his earlier years he was perpetually in hot water; he
tumbled into scrapes as children tumble into puddles. He invited them,
he invented them; and when he came to tell you how his trouble had
come about (and he always told the whole truth), it was difficult to
believe that a man should have been so idiotic.

And yet he was not an idiot; he was supposed to be very clever, and
certainly is very quick and amusing. He was only reckless, and
extraordinarily natural, as natural as if he had been an Irishman. In fact,
of all the Englishmen that I have known he is the most Irish in
temperament (though he has got over it comparatively of late). I used to
tell him that it was a great inconvenience that he didn't speak with a
brogue, because then we should be forewarned, and know with whom
we were dealing. He replied that, by analogy, if he were Irish enough to
have a brogue he would probably be English, which seemed to me an
answer wonderfully in character. Like most