Among a mass of other inconsistencies, which almost likened him to a schoolboy who is having a romp through life instead of playing the game seriously, the Squire, while considering his children in the light of impedimenta, yet cherished a passionate affection for the least worthy of them all, for the one to whom nature had decreed that he should bequeath, with a liberality he had shown his children in no other respect, the largest share of his own failings. Jack Raleigh was handsome, fascinating, improvident to a degree, with no fixed code of morality and no definite powers of reasoning, ruling himself and his actions entirely by a kind of blind instinct such as we find in healthy animals or in children. His love, like his antipathy, was of an elementary character; if he found himself in a complicated situation, which was not rare, he would merely choose the most pleasant course open to him, without giving it a moment's consideration, and would follow it gayly until another obstacle arose which would have to be treated in a similar manner. Whether he was the happier for feeling nothing deeply, belongs to those questions which are argued by thousands of lives every day without a conclusive answer being found to them. That his temperament was the sunnier for it and that his misdeeds were less harmful, is most certain; and since the God whom he believed in, if he believed in one at all, was a kind of inexhaustible Being who could offer him as many fresh opportunities as he had squandered already, and seemed to be the cause, in some indirect way that Jack never attempted to fathom, of occasional magnificent music in churches and cathedrals, his religion as well as his excellent digestion saved him from the fits of depression that usually accompany the sanguine disposition. He had discovered before he was out of his teens that England was not the place for one so restless as he, and he had been sent out to more than one colony "to try his luck," as the Squire said, in a vague hope of shifting his uneasy responsibility for his son's actions on to fortune. But fortune, although not philanthropic in her tendencies, and having no nobler vocation to distract her from her plain duty of looking after her prodigal sons, refused to help him, and he inevitably returned home with more debts, more friends, more anecdotes, but no more stability than before.
It was on a dull morning in July, at breakfast time, that Jack caused his father for the hundredth time to recognize his existence in an unpleasant manner. It was an unfortunate time for his letter to arrive, for there was a mist that day, and as Sir Marcus was profoundly ignorant both of meteorology and the crops, and pretended to be an authority on both, he chose to feel injured because Helen assured him that it was not going to rain, and that his hay was not going to be spoiled. To which the Squire, who never could endure the plain truths of his eldest daughter, replied testily that the mist did mean rain, that his hay was going to be spoiled as it always was, and that he himself was a ruined man; he then sat down at the now silent table and sighed in a dejected manner. Presently, finding that no one was looking at him, he roused himself partially, and made a hearty breakfast behind his newspaper; and when the conversation around him was once more in full swing he condescended to look at his letters. He opened Jack's first, as he always did. It was the old story, told in the boy's usual careless manner: Canada had grown too small for him, he was feeling homesick, and was about to sail for England, and would be with his father almost as soon as his letter, to which effect he was his loving son Jack.
It was not the first letter of the kind that the Squire had received from the same source, and he knew what this one meant: Jack would be back again before the week was out, with an accumulation of debts and not a dollar in his pocket, Jack, with his sunny smile, and his nonchalance, and his utter unconsciousness of offence. Jack meant money, family meant money, and Sir Marcus was close upon overdrawing his banking account already, and had promised a large subscription only the day before to the building fund of the village reading-room. If there had been no stranger present he would have relieved his feelings by a characteristic outburst; but Lady Joan sat opposite to him and saw as much as she wished to see without raising her eyes from her plate, and he felt instinctively that he might merely succeed in making himself ridiculous if he spoke before the opportunity occurred; and, impetuous man as he was, something he could not define restrained him from creating a situation just then which should not be dignified. So he read the letter over again, and he listened mechanically to the conversation of his offending children, without heeding what they said.
"After all," Digby was saying, with a gravity which the subject hardly merited, for in the heart of his own family, although he still remained the prophet, yet he refrained from provoking the serious discussions which were only fitting within the sacred walls of the studio, "after all, it does not matter how bad a fellow is, if he is only artistically so, I mean if he will only be thorough over it."
"It does not matter how wicked we all are, so long as we can see the humor of sin. To be able to laugh at ourselves is the great thing," murmured Lady Joan.
"There is nothing so depressing," continued the musician, without heeding the interruption, "as the spectacle of a man who will not face his own wickedness—or even his own goodness. It is a sign of the age, this wretched spirit of compromise; we don't live in town because it is unhealthy, and the fogs are so bad—"
"My dear, that was not the reason," Lady Raleigh murmured—also unheeded.
"—and we don't live in the country because it is too far to come up to the concerts; so we live at Crouch End or Putney, where an exasperating local railway lies between us and St. James's Hall, and where the ends of the fogs hang about for days. We haven't the pluck to say yea or nay; we leave all our decisions to the gods, who throw them back upon us again, or to—to fate, who only plays with us at will; we would do anything to shirk the responsibility of the ego. Look at Helen, now; the bent of her character is towards religion, yet she hesitates to go into a convent. Therefore her religion does not make her picturesque."
"Digby! How can you argue at breakfast time? And I think you might keep your horrid atheistical notions to yourself before the children," cried Helen, crossly. She had not recovered from her passage of arms with the Squire.
Digby plodded on with his breakfast and his theory.