Hugh Kenrick Read Online Free PDF Page A

Christian Soul
. The vicar of St. Quarrell’s, the parish church, borrowed liberally from the Earl’s many published tracts for his services. For this flattery, the parish of Danvers was richly endowed by the family. It is no mean compliment to have one’s scrivenings treated on a par with Scripture. Basil Kenrick viewed his father’s authorship of the tracts on his study shelves with respectful, sometimes fearful awe, superstitiously believing that the oldEarl had been bequeathed with a gift of moral knowledge quite beyond his own ken.
    The death of his wife from pneumonia affected the old Earl in a strange way. It was as though her passing dissolved his self-imposed bonds of mature respectability, and he was seized by all the vices he had once inveighed against. He abruptly abandoned his dilettantish excursions into theology and moral philosophy and became as profligate and promiscuous as the late Countess. He gambled away enormous sums at the gaming tables and in the cock-fight dens in London. He became a regular patron of the
Folly
, a floating brothel on the Thames, and once bought each of its whores a new broadcloth gown, a pair of silver slippers, and a Dutch watch. He was rarely seen entering his once precious library, except on ill-concealed trysts with a servant girl or one of the more notorious local baronesses. He began to drink the wine cellar dry, and to eat more at one meal than a servant did in a week. His doctor could only attribute his embarrassing behavior to a “choleric imbalance of mental fluids caused by grief for the late Countess.” He followed his wife into the family burial vault in St. Quarrell’s church a mere three years later, having died under scandalous circumstances in a Weymouth inn. His carefree mode of living brought the family to the brink of financial ruin.
    Basil Kenrick left the task of sustaining Danvers to his brother, who did not share their father’s once-chaste sense of aristocracy. Garnet Kenrick wished he had been able to lead a life independent of his older brother. But he gravitated to a career in commerce, chiefly because, on their father’s death, he was the only one capable of sorting out the financial shambles left behind. It was not a chosen career, but it consumed his time and immediate interest, and so it became his career. His late grandfather’s connections on the Board of Trade, and the still thriving merchant company from his great-grandfather’s day, gave him an edge and allowed him to compensate for his brother’s occasional extravagances. He managed the Earl’s business from Danvers and traveled frequently between there and the family company’s offices in Poole, Weymouth, Bristol, and London.
    The Earl left his brother alone in business matters, but harbored a secret envy of him for being able to master them, coupled with a peevish condescension. He resented the special, peer-like relationship Garnet granted to his business associates and even sea captains. Garnet Kenrick did not think himself indefinably superior to anyone.
    The Earl had another reason to distance himself from his brother:Garnet and his wife had children, while he had none. He and his wife, the Countess, almost had one—who would have been heir to the title—but the child was stillborn, and the Countess could produce no more. This was a closely kept secret. Further, Effney, his brother’s wife, mother of a son and a daughter, was a gracious, amiable woman who also lacked airs and whose handsomeness would endure well past her child-bearing years. The Earl’s wife, on the other hand, had allowed herself to grow fat, shrewish, and tyrannical. The Earl was bitterly aware of his wife’s shortcomings, but she was the Countess of Danvers, and he would brook no insolence from anyone about her.
    Once, at a ball he had thrown years ago, he overheard a young squire say to his companion, “The Lady Danvers, I know, is a painfully virtuous woman—virtuous, I dare say, from fear. She