Chapter Eight.
Down.
We referred to a change which had come into Anstey’s manner as regarded his intercourse with our young friend. More than once he had returned to the charge and sounded the latter again as to the probability of his relatives being willing to invest some funds for him in what he was pleased to call their joint concern. But Gerard’s reply had been positive and unvarying. So persuaded was he of their inability to do so that he would not even apply to them. Then it was that Anstey’s manner began to change.
He dropped the intimate, elder-brother kind of tone which had heretofore characterised their intercourse, and which poor Gerard in his youth and inexperience had taken for genuine, and for it substituted a master-and-servant sort of demeanour. He would order Gerard about, here and there, or send him off on an errand, with a short peremptoriness of tone as though he were addressing some particularly lazy and useless native. Or he would always be finding fault—more than hinting that the other was not worth his salt. Now, all this, to a lad of Gerard’s temperament, was pretty galling. The relations between the pair became strained to a dangerous tension.
It happened one morning that Gerard was in the tumble-down old stable, saddling up a horse to start upon some errand for his employer. It was a clear, still day, and through the open door came the sound of voices, which he recognised as belonging to two or three transport-riders, whose waggons were outspanned on the flat outside, and who had been lounging in the store making purchases and chatting just before.
“So I hear they’ve got two more writs out against Anstey,” one voice was saying.
“So? Who’s doing it this time?”
“Oh, Butler and Creighton. They ain’t going to allow him any more tick—not even to the tune of a string of beads. Why, he’s dipped three or four times over. His bills ain’t worth the paper they’re written on.”