a nicety by one John, the Chaplain (evidently one of those sporting
parsons), this warrior retired, done to a turn, to his mountain
fastnesses, and was never heard of again. He would seem, however, to
have passed the word around among his friends, for subsequent
raiding parties studiously avoided the castle, and a peasant who had
succeeded in crossing its threshold was for the future considered to
he “home” and out of the game.
Such was the Dreever of old. In later days, the Welshman having
calmed down considerably, it had lost its militant character. The
old walls still stood, gray, menacing and unchanged, hut they were
the only link with the past. The castle was now a very comfortable
country-house, nominally ruled over by Hildebrand Spencer Poynt de
Burgh John Hannasyde Coombe-Crombie, twelfth Earl of Dreever
(“Spennie” to his relatives and intimates), a light-haired young
gentleman of twenty-four, but in reality the possession of his uncle
and aunt, Sir Thomas and Lady Julia Blunt.
Lord Dreever’s position was one of some embarrassment. At no point
in their history had the Dreevers been what one might call a
parsimonious family. If a chance presented itself of losing money in
a particularly wild and futile manner, the Dreever of the period had
invariably sprung at it with the vim of an energetic blood-hound.
The South Sea Bubble absorbed two hundred thousand pounds of good
Dreever money, and the remainder of the family fortune was
squandered to the ultimate penny by the sportive gentleman who held
the title in the days of the Regency, when Watier’s and the Cocoa
Tree were in their prime, and fortunes had a habit of disappearing
in a single evening. When Spennie became Earl of Dreever, there was
about one dollar and thirty cents in the family coffers.
This is the point at which Sir Thomas Blunt breaks into Dreever
history. Sir Thomas was a small, pink, fussy, obstinate man with a
genius for trade and the ambition of an Alexander the Great;
probably one of the finest and most complete specimens of the came-
over-Waterloo-Bridge-with-half-a crown-in-my-pocket-and-now-look-at-
me class of millionaires in existence. He had started almost
literally with nothing. By carefully excluding from his mind every
thought except that of making money, he had risen in the world with
a gruesome persistence which nothing could check. At the age of
fifty-one, he was chairman of Blunt’s Stores, L’t’d, a member of
Parliament (silent as a wax figure, but a great comfort to the party
by virtue of liberal contributions to its funds), and a knight. This
was good, but he aimed still higher; and, meeting Spennie’s aunt,
Lady Julia Coombe-Crombie, just at the moment when, financially, the
Dreevers were at their lowest ebb, he had effected a very
satisfactory deal by marrying her, thereby becoming, as one might
say, Chairman of Dreever, L’t’d. Until Spennie should marry money,
an act on which his chairman vehemently insisted, Sir Thomas held
the purse, and except in minor matters ordered by his wife, of whom
he stood in uneasy awe, had things entirely his own way.
One afternoon, a little over a year after the events recorded in the
preceding chapter, Sir Thomas was in his private room, looking out
of the window, from which the view was very beautiful. The castle
stood on a hill, the lower portion of which, between the house and
the lake, had been cut into broad terraces. The lake itself and its
island with the little boat-house in the center gave a glimpse of
fairyland.
But it was not altogether the beauty of the view that had drawn Sir
Thomas to the window. He was looking at it chiefly because the
position enabled him to avoid his wife’s eye; and just at the moment
be was rather anxious to avoid his wife’s eye. A somewhat stormy
board-meeting was in progress, and Lady Julia, who constituted the
board of directors, had been heckling the chairman. The point under
discussion was one of etiquette, and in matters of etiquette Sir
Thomas felt himself at a disadvantage.
“I tell you, my dear,” he said to the window, “I am not easy in my
mind.”
“Nonsense,” snapped Lady Julia; “absurd–ridiculous!”