"He asked me if I—if you—if I thought——he asked me to ask you to have a little patience with him about some bills. I didn't know that he had any bill here; but he said you would understand."
"Aye, aye! I understand. It isn't bills for tea, and flour, and bacon, and such like. It's a different kind o' bills the young gentleman's been meddling with; and a fine hand he's made of it."
"Couldn't you help him, father?"
Rhoda spoke pleadingly, but with the timidity which always attended her requests to her father, whose recent indulgence had never reached a point of weakness, and who clearly showed, in all his dealings with his daughter, that he was not carried away by his affection for her, but acted with the consciousness of a will unfettered by precedents, and perfectly able to choose its course without regard to what other people might expect of him.
For herself, in pleading for Algernon, she was not moved by self-conscious sentimentality, neither did she suppose herself to be doing anything heroic. The peculiar tenderness she still felt for him was made up of pity and memory. The Algy she had loved was gone—had melted into thin air, like a dream under the morning sunlight. Mr. Errington, the postmaster of Whitford, and the husband of the Honourable Castalia Kilfinane, was a very different personage. Still he was inextricably connected in her mind with that bright idol of her childhood and her youth. His marriage had put all possibility of love-making between him and herself as much out of the question, to her mind, as if he had been proved to be her brother. Rhoda had read no romances, and she was neither of an innovating spirit nor a passionate temperament, and it is surprising what power a sincere conviction of the irrevocable and inevitable has to control the "natural feelings" we hear so much of! But she clung tenaciously to a better opinion of Algernon than his actions warranted—as has been the case with many another woman—chiefly to justify herself for ever having loved him.
"Couldn't you help him, father?" she repeated, seeing that her father did not at once reply, but was sitting meditating, with a not altogether ill-pleased expression of face.
"Help him!" cried old Max. "Why should I help him? A reprobate, unregenerate, vain, ungrateful worldling! I did help him once, and earned much gratitude for my pains. And what a sneaking, poor, mean, pitiful fellow he must be to come here and whine to you! A poor, pitiful fellow! Talk of a gentleman! Yah!"
Old Max derived so much grim satisfaction from the contemplation of Algernon's pitiful behaviour that it seemed almost to soften him towards the culprit, in whom any glimpse of nobility would not have been very welcome to his enemy. When you hate a man on excellent private grounds, it is certainly unpleasant to see him displaying qualities in public which win a fallacious admiration. And this aggravation was one which old Max had been suffering for some time at the hands of the popular Algernon. His present money difficulties, combined with his unworthy methods of meeting them, at once gratified and justified Jonathan Maxfield's vindictiveness.
He gave forth the queer grunting noise that served him for a laugh, as he said, "And a lot o' good his fine marriage has done him! And his grand relations! I told him long ago that if he wanted help from such as them, he must ask it with a pocket full of money. Then he might ha' been uplifted into high places. And it wasn't only my own wisdom neither, though that might ha' been enough for such a half-fledged young cockerel as he was in them days, seeing it has been enough for his betters before now. I had the warrant of Scripture; for what says Solomon? 'Wealth maketh many friends; but the poor is separated from his neighbour.'"
Still Rhoda did not altogether despair of inducing her father to do something for Algernon. What that something might be, or how far it was possible for her father to assist young Errington, except by simply giving or lending him money, Rhoda was ignorant. Algernon in talking to her had spoken very glibly, but, to her, very unintelligibly, of bills which were in her father's hands; and had pointed out, with an air of candour and conviction, that it would be imprudent on Mr. Maxfield's part to drive matters to extremity. It had all sounded very convincing, simply from the tone in which it was said. Many of us are astonishingly uncritical as to the coherence and cogency of words if they be but set to a good tune.