What is the good of a
peerage if it ends with your life? He was not without his vanities,
though one of the most cynical men of his cynical period.
He arrived therefore at the decision that he would marry some young
and buxom creature of decent birth and fit in appearance to be a
peeress, and decided on Arbella Rossiter.
After a gulp or two and several _moues_ behind his back, she
accepted him. A brilliant marriage ceremony followed, conducted by a
Bishop and an Archdeacon. And then Arbella was carried off to live
in a Bluebeard's Castle he possessed on the Northumbrian coast.
In the three years following her marriage she gave him two boys,
with which he was content, especially as his own health began to
fail a little just then. At the end of four years of marriage with
this cynical, Italianate tyrant, Arbella got very sick of him and
thought more and more tenderly of a certain subaltern in the Cavalry
whom she had once declined to marry on L500 a year. This subaltern
had returned from the South African war, a Colonel and still
extremely good-looking. They had met again at a garden party and
fallen once more deeply in love. If only her tiresome old Borgia
would die--was the thought that came too often into the mind of
Arbella, now entering the "thirties" of life, and with the least
possible misgiving of her Colonel's constancy if she became
presently "_un peu trop mure_.
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