The Foundling Read Free Page A

now hopeful of seeing the great house once more full of distinguished guests, all with their exacting personal servants, and their quite incompatible fads and fancies, driving a lesser man to suicide, but affording Mr. Turvey an exquisite enjoyment.
    The Duke walked down the stairs, and crossed a vast, marble-paved hall to the double doors that led into the gallery. Here it had been the custom of the Family to assemble before dinner since the Duke's grandfather had re-rebuilt the mansion. As the gallery was over a hundred foot long, it had sometimes seemed to the Duke that some smaller apartment might be a preferable assembly room on any but Public Days, but a mild suggestion made to this effect had been greeted by his uncle with such disapproval that with his usual docility he had abandoned any hope of making a change.
    Two liveried footmen, who appeared to have been trying to impersonate wax effigies, suddenly sprang to life, and flung open the doors; the Duke, dwarfed by their height and magnificence, passed between them into the gallery.
    Since September was drawing to an end, and the evenings were already a little chilly, a log-fire had been kindled in the grate at one end of the gallery. Lord Lionel Ware was standing before it, not precisely with his watch in his hand, but presenting the appearance of one who had but that moment restored the timepiece to his pocket. Beside him, and making a praiseworthy if not entirely successful attempt to divert his mind from the lateness of the hour, was the Reverend Oswald Romsey, once tutor to the Duke, now his Chaplain, and engaged in the intervals of his not very arduous duties in writing a learned commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews. On a straw-coloured brocade sofa, wholly shielded from the fire's warmth by her husband's stalwart form, was disposed the Duke's aunt, a lady fashioned in a generous mould which the current mode of high waists and narrow, skirts could not have been said to have flattered; and sitting primly upright in a chair suitably withdrawn from the intimate circle was Miss Scamblesby, a spinster of uncertain age and nebulous relationship, who was always referred to by Lady Lionel as "my cousin," and had been an inmate of Sale Park for as long as the Duke could remember, performing the duties of a lady-in-waiting. As Lady Lionel was extremely kind-hearted, she was not in the least overworked, or browbeaten, the only ills she had to endure being her ladyship's very boring conversation, and his lordship's snubs, which last, however, were dealt out so impartially to every member of the household as to make her feel herself to be quite one of the family.
    But the Duke, who had, his uncle frequently told him, too much sensibility, could not rid himself of the notion that Miss Scamblesby's position was an unhappy one, and he never neglected to bestow on her a distinguishing degree of attention, or to acknowledge a relationship which did not, in fact, exist, by addressing her as Cousin Amelia. When his uncle pointed out to him, not in a carping spirit, but as one who liked accuracy, that being only some kind of a third cousin to Lady Lionel her connection with the Ware family was of the most remote order, he merely smiled, and slid out of a possible argument in a manner rendered perfect by years of practice.
    As he walked down the gallery, he smiled at her, and enquired after the headache she had complained of earlier in the day. While she blushed, thanked, and disclaimed, Lord Lionel crushingly remarked that he did not know why people should have headaches, since he himself had never suffered such an ill in his life; and Mr. Romsey pleased nobody by saying: "Ah, my lord Duke has a fellow-feeling, I daresay! I am sure no one has suffered more from an affliction we more hardy mortals are exempt from!"
    "Stuff and nonsense!" said Lord Lionel, who very much disliked to have his nephew's delicacy of constitution mentioned by anyone other than himself.
    Mr. Romsey's