furnished, and all my lodging-chambers to be suited with all such furniture as is fit, as beds, stools, chairs, cushions, carpets, silver warming-pans, cupboards of plate, fair hangings, etc.; and so for my drawing-chambers in all houses, I will have them delicately furnished with hangings, couch, canopy, cushions, carpets, etc.

“Also, my desire is that you would pay your debts, build up Ashby House and purchase lands and lend no money (as you love God) to the Lord Chamberlain, which would have all, perhaps your life from you; remember his son, my Lord Wildan, what entertainments he gave me when you were at the Tilt-yard.  If you were dead, he said, he would be a husband, a father, a brother, and said he would marry me.  I protest I grieve to see the poor man have so little wit and honesty to use his friend so vilely; also, he fed me with untruths concerning the Charter-House; but that is the least; he wished me much harm; you know how.  God keep you and me from him, and such as he is.

“So now I have declared to you my mind, what I would have, and what I would not have; I pray you, when you be Earl, to allow a thousand pounds more than now I desire and double allowance.—­Your loving wife, ELIZABETH COMPTON.”

CHAPTER XII

TRAGEDIES OF THE TURF

In the whole drama of the British Peerage there are few figures at once so splendid in promise and opportunities, so pathetic in failure and so tragic in their exit as that of the fourth and last Marquess of Hastings.  Seldom has man been born to a greater heritage; scarcely ever has he flung away more prodigally the choicest gifts of fortune.

When Henry Weysford Charles Plantagenet was born one July day in 1842 it was a very fair world on which he opened his eyes, a world in which rank and wealth and exceptional personal gifts should have ensured for him a leading role.  He was still in the cradle when his father, the second lord, died; and he was barely nine years old when the death of his elder brother made the school-boy a full-blown Marquess, the inheritor of vast estates and a princely rent-roll.

But Fate, which had showered such gifts on the young lord had, as so often happens, marred them all by the curse of heredity.  The taint of gambling was in the boy’s blood.  His mother had won an unenviable reputation throughout Europe by her passion for gambling; indeed there were few gaming-tables in Europe at which the “jolly fast Marchioness” was not a familiar and notorious figure.  And his father, the Marquess, was as devoted to horses and turf-gambling as his wife to her cards and roulette.  That the child of such parents should inherit their depraved tastes is not to be marvelled at.  And it was not long before they manifested themselves in a dangerous form.