“Oh, ah—I see! Pity he didn’t though. The fellow is a regular wet blanket.”
There was reason in the speaker’s venom. Scott, who held the proud position of English chaplain at Les Avants for that month, was a fair specimen of the young “masher” parson. He wore a carefully-trimmed moustache and talked with a drawl. He affected lawn tennis in preference to any other form of exercise because it enabled him to array his graceful five foot six of dimensions in faultlessly fitting flannels, and when so arrayed he was under the impression that Apollo himself might take a back seat. He was not a gentleman by birth, and, having all the exuberant assurance of the self-estimating “ranker,” was a standing offence to those who were. Though made much of by a large section of the ladies, always ready to constitute a pet tame cat of a young parson, the men abhorred him. His bumptiousness and chronic infringements of good form met with systematic snubbing, and on more than one occasion nothing but his “cloth” had saved him from being incontinently kicked. Now of all the “setting down” he had received since his arrival at the hotel, that which he had encountered at the hands of Fordham had been the most merciless and exhaustive.
The latter and General Wyatt were leaning against the taffrail smoking their cigars.
“Have you known young Orlebar long?” the old man was saying. “I gathered from what he told me that you had been travelling together for some years.”
“Well, we have only been a couple of months together this summer. Last autumn, though, we returned from a thirteen months’ trip to China and Japan, then home across the Rockies.”
“Indeed! You ought to know of what sort of stuff a fellow is made after a trip of that kind with him.”
“Yes. Phil is a good fellow enough, and he and I suit each other admirably. He always does what he’s told, and can stand being chaffed for his own good. Not many fellows of his age can do that.”
“I like the boy,” went on General Wyatt, “like him immensely. He’s a fine fellow—a finer fellow than his father was. But it’s a thousand pities he has no sort of profession, for when he comes into Claxby and the title he won’t have too much to keep up either upon.”
“I suppose not,” assented Fordham, indifferently. “But then he hasn’t got any expensive tastes or habits.”
“That’s a very good point about him. Still, if his father had put him into some profession instead of allowing him ample means to lead an idle life, it would have been all the better for him. But that’s Frank Orlebar all over. He dotes upon the boy, and so feels bound to indulge him in every particular. That sort of sentimentality was always a grave weakness in Frank Orlebar’s character. His heart was always stronger than his head, and it invariably led him into some serious blunder.”