"Your own
"MARIAN."
To the strong, loving, and loyal heart of Walter, a letter from Marian was a sacred treasure, a full, intense, solemn delight. She had thought the thoughts, written the words, touched the paper. When disappointment, distress, depression, and uncertainty accumulated upon him most ruthlessly, and bore him most heavily to the ground, he shook them from him at the bidding of a letter from her, and rose more than ever determined not to be beaten in the struggle which was to bring him such a reward. The calmness, the seeming coldness even of her letters did not annoy or disappoint him; theirs was the perfect love that did not need protestation--that was as well and as ill, as fully and as imperfectly, expressed by the simplest affirmation as by a score of endearing phrases. No letter of Marian's had ever failed to delight, to strengthen, to encourage Walter Joyce, until this one reached him.
He opened the envelope with an eager touch, his dark cheek flushed, and a tender smile shone in his eyes; he murmured a word of love as the closely written sheets met his impatient gaze.
"A long letter to-day, Marian, my darling. Did you guess how sadly I wanted it?"
But as Walter read the letter his countenance changed. He turned back, and read some portions twice over, then went on, and when he concluded it began again. But not with the iteration of a lover refreshing his first feeling of delight, seeking pet passages to dwell on afresh. There was no such pleasurable impulse in the moody re-reading of his letter. Walter frowned more than once while he read it, and struck the hand in which he held it monotonously against his knee when he had acquired the full unmistakable meaning of it.
His face had been sad and anxious when the letter reached him--he had reason for sadness and anxiety--but when he had read it for the last time, and thrust it into his breast-pocket, his face was more than sad and anxious--it was haggard, gloomy, and angry.
[CHAPTER XI.]
THE LOUT.
Mr. Creswell's only son, who was named after Mr. Creswell's only brother, by no means resembled his prototype either in appearance, manners, or disposition. For whereas Tom Creswell the elder had been a long, lean, washed-out-looking person, with long, wiry black hair, sallow complexion, hollow cheeks, and a faint dawn of a moustache (in his youth he had turned down his collars and modelled himself generally on Lord Byron, and throughout his life he was declared by his wife to be most aristocratic and romantic-looking), Tom Creswell the younger had a small, round, bullet head, with closely cropped sandy hair, eyes deeply sunken and but little visible, snub nose, wide mouth, and dimpled chin. Tom Creswell the elder rose at noon, and lay upon the sofa all day, composing verses, reading novels, or playing the flute. Tom Creswell the younger was up at five every morning, round through the stables, saw the horses properly fed, peered into every corn-bin ("Darng, now whey do thot? Darnged if un doesn't count cam-grains, I think," was the groom's muttered exclamation on this proceeding), ran his hand over the animals, and declared that they "didn't carry as much flesh as they might," with a look at the helpers which obviously meant that they starved the cattle and sold the oats. Then Tom the younger would go to the garden, where his greatest delight lay in counting the peaches and nectarines, and plums and apricots, nestling coyly against the old red south wall, in taking stock of the cucumbers and melons under their frames, and in ticking off the number of the bunches of grapes slowly ripening in the sickly heat of the vinery, while the Scotch head-gardener, a man whose natural hot-headedness was barely kept within bounds by the strictness of his religious opinions, would stand by looking on, outwardly placid, but inwardly burning to deliver himself of his sentiments in the Gaelic language. Tom Creswell the elder was always languid and ailing; as a boy he had worn a comforter, and a hare-skin on his chest, had taken cough-lozenges and jujubes, had been laughed at and called "Molly" and "Miss" by his schoolfellows, and had sighed and simpered away his existence. Tom Creswell the younger was strong as a Shetland pony, and hard as a tennis-ball, full of exuberant vitality which, not finding sufficient vent in ordinary schoolboy fun, in cricket, or hockey, or football, let itself off in cruelty, in teasing and stoning animals, in bullying smaller boys. Tom Creswell the elder was weak, selfish, idle, and conceited, but--you could not help allowing it--he was a gentleman. Tom Creswell the younger--you could not possibly deny it--was a blatant cad.