"I don't own a stick outside my own demesne wall!" says Colonel St.
George. "Of all the hundreds of acres of mountain that my father had,
there isn't as much as one patch of bog left that I could cut a sod of
turf in!"
This whisk of a vanished brush was a gesture well calculated to enrage
Major Dick. It was senseless of St. George to boast of his
limitations, and yet no one better than Dick knew what must be the
feeling of emancipation that prompted the boast.
Autocracy dies hard, and it is probable that long after Leagues of
Nations have decreed the abolition of all Rulers, the Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table will still, in the most inveterate Republics, issue,
unquestioned, his unalterable edicts, with his coat-tails monopolising
the dining-room fire, and the family income concentrated in his cheque
book. Dick Talbot-Lowry's pigheadedness was at the root of the
downsliding of Mount Music. Having faced, undaunted, deputations of
his tenants; deputations of public bodies; ("Damned interfering
blackguards, who ought to be taught to mind their own business!"),
having made light of advice from his friends, and of anonymous
threatening letters from, presumably, his enemies, he still held fast,
and refused to sell the property that had come to him from the men
whose portraits had looked down on him from the old walls of Mount
Music, all the days of his life.
Pages:
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226