VI

THE SUICIDES



Lord Argentine was a great favourite in London
Society. At twenty he had been a poor man, decked with the
surname of an illustrious family, but forced to earn a
livelihood as best he could, and the most speculative of
money-lenders would not have entrusted him with fifty pounds on
the chance of his ever changing his name for a title, and his
poverty for a great fortune. His father had been near enough to
the fountain of good things to secure one of the family livings,
but the son, even if he had taken orders, would scarcely have
obtained so much as this, and moreover felt no vocation for the
ecclesiastical estate. Thus he fronted the world with no
better armour than the bachelor's gown and the wits of a younger
son's grandson, with which equipment he contrived in some way to
make a very tolerable fight of it. At twenty-five Mr. Charles
Aubernon saw himself still a man of struggles and of warfare
with the world, but out of the seven who stood before him and
the high places of his family three only remained. These three,
however, were "good lives," but yet not proof against the Zulu
assegais and typhoid fever, and so one morning Aubernon woke up
and found himself Lord Argentine, a man of thirty who had faced
the difficulties of existence, and had conquered. The situation
amused him immensely, and he resolved that riches should be as