Old

He was always called “Old Lord Madeley,” but as a matter of fact he had but turned the half-century some four or five years previously. The man and his history were curious. The twenty-fifth holder of the ancient Barony of Madeley, he was a legitimate scion of the Plantagenets and an illegitimate one of the Stuarts; and he had been born the youngest child of his parents’ marriage.

In these later times the ancient and historic houses of Norman England have[10] fallen upon impoverished days, and a younger son succeeds to but a pittance. The land is there for the eldest, but each generation leaves it more burdened than did its predecessor, and there is little if any margin realisable in hard cash.

[10]

Such a pittance had been the fortune to which Charles de Bohun Fitz Aylwyn had succeeded at the death of his father. Hoarding his few poor hundreds per annum, he had turned his back upon the society into which he had been born, settled himself in dingy lodgings in Bloomsbury, and lapsed into an eccentric recluse, with not a single thought beyond the study of the science in which his soul delighted.

His eldest brother died childless after a brief but brilliant reign, bequeathing the whole of his personalty to his widow in an attempt to increase the meagre jointure which was her portion. In the realisation of that personalty every stick of furniture[11] and each single spoon in the old Manor House, save the portraits on the walls, were passed under the hammer of the auctioneer. The second brother was an absentee landlord, never going near his property, and draining it to the last penny. Strangers hired his house from him until he died.

[11]

At his death the title and estates passed to Charles de Bohun, then and thereafter twenty-fifth Baron Madeley in the peerage of England.

With a mild curiosity his relatives and the world at large wondered what on earth he would do with the inheritance. For months he never went near the place.

Then, without a word or hint of warning, he left London, and travelled down into Shropshire by the evening train. He had never heard of slip coaches, he had forgotten where an obsequious porter had told him he would have to change, and at nine o’clock at night he had been turned out of[12] the train at Shrewsbury, twenty miles beyond his destination.

[12]

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