When Brough had gone away to her far superior place, and she had been
succeeded by one variety of objectionable or incompetent person after
another, he had still continued to learn. In different ways he silently
collected information, and all of it was unpleasant, and, as he grew
older, it took for some years one form. Lack of resources, which should
of right belong to persons of rank, was the radical objection to his
people. At the town house there was no money, at Mount Dunstan there was
no money. There had been so little money even in his grandfather's time
that his father had inherited comparative beggary. The fourteenth Earl
of Mount Dunstan did not call it "comparative" beggary, he called
it beggary pure and simple, and cursed his progenitors with engaging
frankness. He never referred to the fact that in his personable youth he
had married a wife whose fortune, if it had not been squandered, might
have restored his own. The fortune had been squandered in the course of
a few years of riotous living, the wife had died when her third son was
born, which event took place ten years after the birth of her second,
whom she had lost through scarlet fever. James Hubert John Fergus
Saltyre never heard much of her, and barely knew of her past existence
because in the picture gallery he had seen a portrait of a tall, thin,
fretful-looking young lady, with light ringlets, and pearls round
her neck.
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