It was, perhaps, the solitary strand
of romance in his nature, the feudal feeling that the Mount Music
tenants were his, as they had been his ancestors', to have and to
hold, to rule, to arbitrate for, and to stand by, as a fond and
despotic husband rules and stands by an obedient wife, loving her and
bullying her (but both entirely for her good). He had, moreover, the
desire to disparage and to disprove new ideas, that is a sign of a
mind incapable of originality, and anxious to assert itself
negatively, since it must otherwise remain silent.
"But Dick," his friends would say, "there isn't a property this side
of the county that isn't sold, except your own!"
"What's that to me?" says Dick, as stubborn and stupid a King Canute
as ever sat with the tide nearing the tops of his hunting-boots; "I
don't care a damn what anybody else does! And what's more," he would
add, gloomily, "_I_ can't afford to sell at seventeen years'
purchase. Anyhow, what's mine's my own! I'll be shot if I'll be
bullied!"
"I wouldn't be at all surprised if you were!" the friends would reply
darkly.
To sell at seventeen years' purchase, was what Mr. St. Lawrence
Coppinger had done, following the advice of his agent and solicitor,
Mr. Bartholomew Mangan, and his cousin, and late guardian, Major
Talbot-Lowry, had found it hard to forgive him. The business had been
arranged while Larry was in Paris, and the expostulations that might
have prevailed if delivered _viva voce_, failed of their effect
when presented on foreign paper, in Cousin Dick's illegible scrawl.
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