Lord Tenham had died a few years later at Port Said, after descending
into all the hells of degenerate debauch. His father had lived
longer--long enough to make of himself something horribly near an
imbecile, before he died suddenly in Paris. The Mount Dunstan who
succeeded him, having spent his childhood and boyhood under the shadow
of the "bad lot," had the character of being a big, surly, unattractive
young fellow, whose eccentricity presented itself to those who knew
his stock, as being of a kind which might develop at any time into any
objectionable tendency. His bearing was not such as allured, and his
fortune was not of the order which placed a man in the view of the
world. He had no money to expend, no hospitalities to offer and
apparently no disposition to connect himself with society. His
wild-goose chase to America had, when it had been considered worth while
discussing at all, been regarded as being very much the kind of thing a
Mount Dunstan might do with some secret and disreputable end in view.
No one had heard the exact truth, and no one would have been inclined to
believe if they had heard it. That he had lived as plain Jem Salter, and
laboured as any hind might have done, in desperate effort and mad hope,
would not have been regarded as a fact to be credited.
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