"He ain't a very handsome chap," he returned foolishly, "don't favour either father or mother—hey?"
Gaston overheard this and other similar witticisms, and his blood rose hot within him.
The cruelty and indelicacy of it all made him hate, where, heretofore, he had but felt contempt.
He realized most keenly that in his lonely life among the pines the few interests and friendships that he had permitted himself were deeper than he had believed.
Jock Filmer, during the closer contact of daily labour, had become to him a rude prototype of a Jonathan. They had found each other out, and behind the screen that divided them from others, they held communion sacred to themselves. They read together in Gaston's shack. They had, at times, skimmed dangerously near the Pasts that both, for reasons of their own, kept shrouded. After one of these close calls of confidence, they would drift apart for a time—afraid of each other—but the growing attraction they felt was strengthening after the three or four years wherein an unconscious foundation had been laid.
Then Gaston, too, realized that he had banked much upon the marriage he had brought about between Jude and Joyce. In saving himself from temptation, he felt he had sacrificed the girl, unless he could bring into her life an element that would satisfy her blind gropings.
To argue that in saving himself he had saved her, was no comfort. He had not been called upon to elect himself arbiter of Joyce's future. No; to put it baldly, in his loneliness he had dabbled in affairs that did not concern him—and he must pay for his idiocy.
To that end he had, at first, put himself and his private funds at Jude's disposal. He had had hopes that by so doing he might help Jude to decent manliness. But that hope soon died. Jude, lazy with the inertness of a too sharply defined ancestry, became rapidly a well-developed parasite.
Even when he accepted the contract to build Ralph Drew's house, he had done so from two motives. By this means he could, he found, command more of Gaston's money than in any other way, and by assuming the responsibility he placed himself on a social pinnacle that satisfied his vanity. He became a man of importance. Gaston and Filmer, glad with the intelligence of men who know the value of work, took the actual burden upon themselves. Lauzoon had the empty glory; they had the blessing of toil that brought their faculties into play, and gave them relief from somberer thoughts. But Gaston was too normal a man not to consider the gravity of conditions that were developing. His hopes of Jude had long ago sunk into a contemptuous understanding of the shiftless fellow. He had, however, believed that the hold he had upon him insured a comparatively easy life for Joyce. This, too, he now saw was a false belief.
He knew the girl. He knew that mere housing and assured food were little to her, if deeper things failed.