From the time of his return to his uncle's house, under his cousin Lorin's care, in deep mourning for the youthful bride of whom typhoid fever had, so he said, deprived him, Wallace Armstrong's conduct had grown daily worse. At the beginning he did indeed make some pretence of earning his living as a clerk in his uncle's employment; but his unpunctuality, his carelessness, and his habit of appropriating as his own any loose change that might pass through his hands, speedily proved his unsuitability for such a position. Both Lorin and his uncle set to work to find some outdoor occupation which such a ne'er-do-well might find within his powers; but Wallace's total unreliability, his insolence and laziness, together with his intemperate habits, rendered him undesirable in any wage-earning capacity whatever. He did not like work and had no intention of working, and he detested regular hours and the conventions of peaceable citizenship. But for Lorin's incessant care and kindness and the generosity with which he denied himself in order to provide his cousin with more than the mere necessities of life, Wallace would have gone under long before. Yet he was in no way grateful to Lorin, but cherished against him a bitter snarling envy which he did not scruple to express in words.
"I know you enjoy unselfishness and that sort of thing," he would say, while pocketing his cousin's money, "so I won't deprive you of the chance of feeling virtuous. This doling out pocket-money to me, and filling up my whiskies with your infernal soda-water, and bailing me out when I am run in, all places you in a beautiful light of self-sacrifice and stained-glass-window sort of nobility and charity. The prodigal son's brother made a great mistake in openly grudging the outlay on the other fellow; it would have paid him better in the long run to have pretended a great concern for his welfare, as you do for mine."
On this particular evening, when Wallace found himself in the Crescent outside Mrs. Vandeleur's house, he did not feel in the mood for his favourite amusement of sneering at his cousin. Certain things he had seen and heard during the course of his visit had made an unusually strong impression upon his ordinarily callous and drink-sodden brain.
"I love your cousin because he is a frank and loyal and honourable gentleman—honest in his dealings with men, and gentle and chivalrous to all women."
He could hear the words now ringing through his head in those sweet deep tones of a voice which was oddly familiar to him.
Had this Lina Graham known him intimately instead of being a complete stranger to him, she could scarcely have chosen words more calculated to wound him by emphasising the differences between him and his cousin.
Frank and loyal, honourable and honest, gentle and chivalrous!
Not one of those qualities was to be found in Wallace, and he knew it. Even his apparent brusque truthfulness was assumed, and he could, if the occasion served, lie with apparent directness and simplicity. Women in general, or, at least, such women as he met, liked a man the better for his bad reputation; but this little prude in white was clearly not of these. He hated to recall the scorn of her gaze; it pricked and stung him even while he endeavoured to drown all clear remembrance in copious draughts of fiery fluid. To-night, as he wandered from one to another of his usual haunts, the miserable futility of the life he led came before him for the first time. In the clear eyes of a girl he saw himself mirrored and shrank in horror and disgust at the reflection.
In his thirty-first year, what was he but a homeless waif, a gaol-bird and a drunkard, subsisting upon charity, and biting the hand that fed him? Wallace buried his head in his hands and groaned aloud at the thought. Among the common and degraded persons by whom he was surrounded not one dared to ask what ailed him, for his surly and insolent temper was well known. Looking up and around him, he felt that he hated his companions, and that the coarse joviality which he had hitherto commended as unconventional was mere forced drunken buffoonery. Lina Grahame would know her contempt to be justified could she see him among such surroundings. With a muttered oath, and leaving his glass unemptied, he strode out again into the night. The fog got into his throat and choked him, the streets were deserted, but for a passing policeman on his beat and a few pedestrians loudly complaining of the bitter frost and hurrying home.
Home! Wallace had no home. His landlady had already more than once given him notice to quit; there would certainly be neither fire nor welcome awaiting him there. As to his uncle's house, he could indeed slip in there on the sly; but he had given his word to his cousin not to present himself there when he had been drinking too freely, and of a certainty he had been drinking too freely to-night.