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.

While he was still an undergraduate at Oxford the young Marquess who,
from childhood, could not bear the sight of a book when there was a dog
or a horse to claim his attention, began that career on the turf which
was to be as tragic in its end as it was dazzling in its zenith. He
bought from a Mr Henry Padwick for L13,500 a horse called Kangaroo,
which was not worth the cost