Death was preferable, in
his view, to having such a name soiled in the haunts of jockeys and
courtesans and usurers; and, keen as was the anguish which the conduct
of the duke to his mother or himself had often occasioned him, it
was sometimes equalled in degree by the sorrow and the shame which he
endured when he heard of the name of Bellamont only in connection with
some stratagem of the turf or some frantic revel. Without a friend,
almost without an acquaintance, Montacute sought refuge in love. She who
shed over his mournful life the divine ray of feminine sympathy was
his cousin, the daughter of his mother's brother, an English peer, but
resident in the north of Ireland, where he had vast possessions. It was
a family otherwise little calculated to dissipate the reserve and gloom
of a depressed and melancholy youth; puritanical, severe and formal in
their manners, their relaxations a Bible Society, or a meeting for the
conversion of the Jews. But Lady Katherine was beautiful, and all were
kind to one to whom kindness was strange, and the soft pathos of whose
solitary spirit demanded affection.
Montacute requested his father's permission to marry his cousin, and was
immediately refused. The duke particularly disliked his wife's family;
but the fact is, he had no wish that his son should ever marry.
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