CHAPTER XIII

_BEFORE AND AFTER BREAKFAST_


Next morning early I visited my favourite full-length portrait in the
chocolate coat and top-boots. Scanty as had been my cousin Monica's notes
upon this dark and eccentric biography, they were everything to me. A soul
had entered that enchanted form. Truth had passed by with her torch, and a
sad light shone for a moment on that enigmatic face.

There stood the _roué_--the duellist--and, with all his faults, the hero
too! In that dark large eye lurked the profound and fiery enthusiasm of his
ill-starred passion. In the thin but exquisite lip I read the courage of
the paladin, who would have 'fought his way,' though single-handed, against
all the magnates of his county, and by ordeal of battle have purged the
honour of the Ruthyns. There in that delicate half-sarcastic tracery of the
nostril I detected the intellectual defiance which had politically isolated
Silas Ruthyn and opposed him to the landed oligarchy of his county, whose
retaliation had been a hideous slander. There, too, and on his brows and
lip, I traced the patience of a cold disdain. I could now see him as he
was--the prodigal, the hero, and the martyr. I stood gazing on him with a
girlish interest and admiration. There was indignation, there was pity,
there was hope. Some day it might come to pass that I, girl as I was, might
contribute by word or deed towards the vindication of that long-suffering,
gallant, and romantic prodigal. It was a flicker of the Joan of Arc
inspiration, common, I fancy, to many girls. I little then imagined how