“Well, if you will marry thumping heiresses, with half a dozen palaces of their own——”
“Yes, I know, old man. Still—well, I can’t expect her to share my feeling about it, can I?” He smiled again, this time rather ruefully. “In fact, she’s pressing me to settle the matter now.”
“What do you mean? Sir Paget’s still alive! Is she asking for a promise, or what?”
“She wants me to sell my remainder—subject to my father’s life-interest. Nina likes things definitely settled, you see. She doesn’t like Cragsfoot.” To my considerable surprise, he accompanied these last words with a very definite wink. A smile, a sigh, a wink—yes, Waldo was recovering some independence of thought, if not of action. But in this affair it was his action that mattered, not his thoughts. Still, the fact remained that his wink was an unmistakable reference to the past—to Lucinda.
“Sir Paget wouldn’t like it, would he?” I suggested.
“No, I’m afraid not—not the idea of it, at first. But a man is told to cleave to his wife. After all, if I have a son to inherit it, he wouldn’t be Rillington of Cragsfoot, he’d be Dundrannan.”
“Of course he would. I’d forgotten. But does it make much difference?”
“And amongst all the rest of it, Cragsfoot wouldn’t be much more than an appendage. I love Nina, Julius, but I wish sometimes that she wasn’t quite so damned rich! Don’t think for an instant that she ever rams it down my throat. She never would.”
“My dear chap, I know her. I’m sure she’d be incapable of——”
“But there the fact is. And it creates—well, a certain situation. I say, I’m not keeping you? My ladies are shopping, and I’ve an hour off, but if you——”
“I’ve time to hear anything you want to say. And you’re not tired?”
“Strong as a horse now. I enjoy walking. Look here, old chap. Of course, there are lots of these ‘new rich,’ as the papers call them, who’d pay a long price for Cragsfoot, but——”
“Thinking of anybody in particular?” I put in.
“Never mind!” He laughed—almost one of his old hearty laughs. “Well, yes. Have you ever had any reason——? I mean, it’s funny you should ask that.”
“Something a certain friend of ours once let fall set me thinking.”
“Well, if that idea took shape, if Nina wanted it——”
Perhaps in the end she wouldn’t! I was thinking that possibly the course of events might cause Lady Dundrannan not to wish to see her cousin—and his establishment—at Cragsfoot.