The duplicate death

Old Lord Madeley had taken unto himself a wife—one of the beautiful Sisters Alvarez of the Pavilion Theatre of Varieties and the other West-end halls. Whereat the world of Society wondered for ten days. His relatives never ceased to wonder.

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 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.

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.