“What did Jim want, himself, for the boy?”
“I don’t know. He talked about Sir Thomas perhaps offering to pay for his education, but I don’t think he really expected it. In fact I don’t suppose they’d have done it, if Jim had lived. They were pretty well fed up with him,” said Mrs. Aviolet, with her usual inexorable determination that spades should be spades. “Tell me, did Ford hate poor old Jim?”
“They were on very unfriendly terms,” said Lord Charlesbury. “I am afraid there was much jealousy between them. It was never a happy relation.”
“I daresay that’s one reason why Ford is so beastly to me. He always is, you know. He sneers at me, and if I make mistakes—well, when I made mistakes, I suppose I ought to say—he always tries to make it out worse than it is. Oh, he’s hateful!”
“Ford Aviolet always strikes me as a disappointed man,” Lord Charlesbury said reflectively. “He has always just missed things. Although he was not brought up in an intellectual milieu, by any means, he has only just missed being a very clever man. And he has missed a certain popularity that Jim, if I may say so, always obtained whenever he chose to ask for it—especially amongst women. I sometimes think that Ford has resented that. He did well in South Africa, too, but somehow he was passed over, when it came to promotion or decorations. One affects not to care about these things, but I don’t know—I don’t know.”
“I can’t feel a bit sorry for him,” Rose declared. “He’s somehow too contemptuous to seem like a person who has, as you say, just failed. Why doesn’t he marry, and have a son, and then they wouldn’t bother so much about my Cecil.”
Charlesbury turned upon her a gaze that, for all its kindliness, was exceedingly penetrating.
“Do you really wish that?”
She stared back at him.
“Of course. Oh, I see what you mean! But I should hate to think that Cecil would ever have Squires, and be obliged to live there, and do just what the other Aviolets have done before him. I’d rather he made a life for himself.”