I finally made up my mind that his face was one I should never care for. He was decidedly a handsome man, though unusually old-looking for his age, which could not have been more than sixty.
His thick dark eyebrows lay like a bar across his high forehead. A long hooked nose drooped over an iron-grey moustache, which, when he smiled, lifted in a peculiar way, and showed long and slightly prominent yellow teeth. His unwholesomely pallid skin was deeply lined, and hung in folds under the dark sunken eyes, giving a look of age which was further contributed to by the stoop in his square shoulders. As I glanced from him to Willy, I concluded that the latter’s blonde commonplace good looks must have been inherited from his mother.
Rousing himself from the morose silence into which he had fallen, my uncle proceeded to apply himself to the task of entertaining me by a dissertation on the trade and agriculture of California. I soon found that he had all the desire to impart information which characterizes those whose knowledge of a subject is taken from pamphlets; but I listened with all politeness to his description of the country in which I had lived most of my life. Willy maintained a discreet silence, but from time to time bestowed on me glances of sympathy and approbation. Evidently Willy did not know how to talk to his father.
As dinner progressed, I observed that, if Roche allowed his master’s glass to remain empty, he was at once given a sign to refill it, and my uncle became more and more diffusely instructive.
During dessert a pause at length gave me an opportunity of changing the conversation.
“I saw such a pretty girl at your gate lodge as we drove in,” I said. “She looked delightful in the moonlight, with a shawl thrown over her head.”
If Uncle Dominick had looked black at the mention of The O’Neill, he became doubly so at this apparently inoffensive remark. Glancing for explanation to Willy, I was amazed to see that he had become crimson, and was elaborately trying to show his want of interest in the subject by balancing a fork on the edge of his wine-glass.
“Yes,” said my uncle; “she is a good-looking girl enough, and no one knows it better than she does. When people in that class of life are taken out of their proper place”—with great severity—“they at once begin to presume.”
Willy upset his wine-glass with a sudden jerk. For my part, I was so taken aback by this tirade, that I thought my safest plan lay in immediate flight. Willy got up with alacrity, and, following me from the room, opened the drawing-room door. He looked confused and annoyed.
“Can you take care of yourself in there for a while?” he said. “I’ll be with you in a few minutes.”