The other sat down again and threw his hat on the table, smiling. “Gloom?” he asked. “And have you still that name? You were so as a little laddie in Aberdeen, but I thought you would have left off the Scotch blues long ago with your tartan.”
“I wish I could,” cried Gordon, “as I left off the burr from my tongue. How I hated the place—all except Dee-side and old Lachin-y-gair! That pleased me for its wildness. If God had a hand in its valleys, the devil must have had a hoof in some of its ravines, for the clouds foamed up from their crevices like the spray of the ocean of hell. Dallas,” he said, veering, “what a violent, unlovely little wretch it was we used to know so many years ago,—you never saw him, Hobhouse!—that little boy in Aberdeen!”
Hobhouse looked up. There was a curious note in the voice, a sort of brooding inquiry, of regret, of wistfulness all in one. It was a tone he had never heard so plainly but once before—a night when they two had sat together before a camp-fire on the Greek sea-coast, when Gordon had talked of old Cambridge days, and of Matthews, his classmate, destined to be drowned. It was this tone Hobhouse heard.
The older man’s eyes had a retrospective haze, which he winked away, as he smoothed down the frayed edges of his waistcoat with a hesitating hand, as though half-embarrassed under the other’s gaze.
“A little misshapen unit of a million,” continued Gordon, “a miserable nothing of something, who dreamed barbarous fantasies and found no one who understood him—no one but one. Do you remember him, Dallas?”
The other nodded, his head turned away. “He was not so hard to understand.”
“Not for you, Dallas, and it’s for that reason most of all I am going to paint his picture. Will it bore you, Hobhouse?” he asked whimsically. “To discuss childhood is such a snivelling, popping small-shot, water-hen waste of powder to most people.”
Hobhouse shook his head, and the speaker went on:
“First of all, I wish you would witness a signature for me,”—and handed him the paper he had taken from his pocket.
As the young man glanced at it, he looked up with quick surprise, but checked himself and, signing it, leaned back in his chair.