The Bradstane neighbours—people in districts like that are neighbours if they do not live more than ten miles apart—abandoned themselves at first with joy and satisfaction, and a keenly pleasurable sense of having found a new interest, to this first branch of the business—the collecting of data. Women asked their men—and declined to be put off with mere vague, general statements in reply—what they thought of Otho Askam; and men said things to each other about him, and laughed, or nodded, or shrugged, as the case might be.
The first interest gradually but surely turned into disappointment. People in general discovered, or felt that they had discovered, that Otho Askam was a decidedly[decidedly] horsey, slangy young fellow. It was soon made manifest that he had a powerful distaste for general society, as found in the country, with its dinners, dances, and lunches. Then again it was said—by whom no one could exactly tell—that he was full of whims and humours and oddities without end—not pleasant oddities; was very lavish of his money on one day, and very stingy with it on the next; had a most moody and uncertain temper, which sometimes would run into fierce, white-hot passions, with little or no cause for them, or, again, into sullen silence, more difficult than the fury to understand or combat.
There was one group of facts eagerly seized upon by the scandalmongers, and even by those who were not scandalmongers, of the vicinity. The matrons and the maids around were alike grieved that a young man so richly endowed with every external advantage should prove so very ungentle, unpromising a character; that he should set at nought their customs, despise their burnt-offerings, and openly neglect their galas and festivities. That alone would have pained the matrons and the maids; but that was not all. There was a thorn more galling still, which he contrived to plant in their sides, so as to wound them shrewdly. After he had been at home a few months, it became universally known that there was one house in the neighbourhood at which he visited often, indeed, constantly, and that one the last which would have been expected to attract him—at Balder Hall, namely, where old Miss Strangforth lived with her niece, who had for more than two years been engaged to Michael Langstroth. Magdalen Wynter had never been a favourite among the women of the country-side; she was exceedingly beautiful, and did nothing to conciliate them; she was penniless, and treated them as if they were beneath her. That winter she became less popular than ever, and the secret thought in many a virgin bosom was, ‘Greedy wretch! Could she not have been satisfied with one?’
This attachment to Balder Hall, and the innumerable times that his horse and he were reported to have been seen travelling over the road thither, was the canker which vexed the hearts of the womankind. A good many of the young men began presently to say that Otho was so cross in his temper that the only way to get on with him was to let him alone as much as possible; and, by and by, prudent fathers, however much they might have approved of him as a husband for one of their spotless daughters, began to think it was as well that their sons should not have too much to do with him. Nothing tangible had been alleged against him during those months; nothing actively bad; but, on the other hand, there was nothing good. In any of the staider pursuits of a country gentleman of his standing, politics, county business, public affairs of any kind, he took not the faintest or most elementary interest; nay, he had been known, when occasion offered, to express a rough kind of contempt for them, and for those who troubled themselves with them. Altogether, Otho Askam, who had been a good deal looked forward to as the coming man, created much disappointment now that he had come.
The last fact which formed food for gossip and wonderment was, that that gentlemanly, well-bred youth, Gilbert Langstroth, against whom scandal had never raised so much as a whisper, who was known to be good—look at the way in which he devoted himself to his failing father—and was said, by those who knew him, to be as clever as he was good—this paragon amongst sons and young men became the chosen friend and associate of Otho Askam, almost from the day of his arrival in Bradstane. Gossip exhausted itself in trying to find reasons for this alliance; in discovering points of resemblance between two such diverse characters, points which might account for the intimacy which had sprung up between them. Gossip spent her breath in vain. Undisturbed, and unheeding what was said about them, the young men remained and continued to be friends, and friends who were almost inseparable. The neighbourhood presently discovered that to stand perpetually with a gape on one’s mouth is undignified, so it ceased to gape, shrugged its shoulders, and said, ‘Well, if I were Mr. Langstroth, I should not like my son to form such an intimacy.’
The neighbourhood could not possibly have been more surprised than was Gilbert’s brother, Michael, though he kept his surprise to himself, and naturally did not hear very much of that felt by other persons. He had often chaffed Gilbert about his having no friends; acquaintances in plenty, but no chum, as the absent Roger Camm was Michael’s own chum. Gilbert had always replied—
‘Wait a bit. Every one does not suit me for a friend. When I do find one, I’ll stick to him.’
And then Otho Askam came. Gilbert appeared to have found the combination of qualities he wished for in a friend, and his words were fulfilled. He ‘stuck to him.’
The intimacy went on for more than a year, during which time the tranquil, gentle countenance of Gilbert Langstroth, with its slight, tolerant smile, was to be seen oftener than not side by side with the strange, fierce face of Otho Askam, with its breathless expression. ‘He looks,’ said a girl to Michael once, ‘as if he were always hunting something, and meant to kill it when he caught it.’
It was undoubtedly a bizarre alliance, but at the end of a year people had, in a measure, got to accept it, and it was an understood thing that its effect upon Gilbert was one which he was quite able to sustain with impunity; in other words, that, whatever might be the case with Otho Askam, Gilbert Langstroth continued to be a respectable member of society, and was not even thinking of going to the bad.