‘I tell you I was not discussing it,’ said Michael, his dark brows drawing together. ‘Sir Thomas began. I met him as I was riding from——’
‘Sir Thomas be d—d!’ said Gilbert, so heartily, and with such intense emphasis, that Michael stared at him. This anger, passion, and violent language, belonged to a phase in his brother’s character of which he had scarcely suspected the existence. This sudden display might have put a suspicious man on the alert, but Michael Langstroth was not suspicious; and, moreover, he was one of those who, while they can fight the world well enough, can oppose an iron front to their enemies, and treat their detractors with careless scorn, are very tender, very weak, very sensitive where their friends and those they love are concerned. He saw only that Gilbert was vexed, and felt only that he was sorry to have been the one to vex him. So to change the subject, he said—
‘Well, I should be glad enough to see the factories working again; but I must say I wish I had a couple of thousands to start with. I would be married to-morrow.’
Gilbert, who had other views for his thousands than, to use his own phrase, ‘to give them to Magdalen Wynter to buy furniture with,’ felt in his secret soul that love must make any man small; that it might make even a generous man selfish.
‘What interest could you pay?’ he asked.
Michael shrugged his shoulders, knowing no reply to that question; and Gilbert, in the tone of a tutor, who is master of his subject, haranguing a pupil who does not know its A B C, went on: ‘You are my brother, and, of course, I would like to help you first, if I could; but we cannot afford it, Michael. We must wait. It is our only course. Marriage must wait, and prosperity must wait. To hand you out a couple of thousands now, would mean to throw our affairs back for years; and as for my father and me——’
‘Oh, of course, I was joking,’ said Michael carelessly. ‘I know there is no royal road to that kind of thing, but only hard work, and plenty of it.’
He spoke as if he considered the subject at an end, and they rode the rest of the way in silence. Gilbert’s mind was busy, and his indignation active in that he had such a mean-minded brother.
‘I verily believe he would accept the situation of overseer to the parish pump, if it should give him fifty pounds a year, and bring him any nearer being married to that doll,’ he thought; and this sarcasm was, as it were, the froth or scum thrown to the surface by an anger, a fear, and an emotion which was at that time the deepest thing he could feel, and of which it was no more the adequate measure than a yard-stick would be adequate for measuring an ocean. And afterwards, when this first ebullition of feeling was over, he fell to brooding over the matter in a way which was inevitable from his nature and temperament, as well as from his upbringing, and the lines in which his life had been cast.
‘What will become of my work,’ he asked himself, as he often had asked himself lately, ‘if my father were to die, as he might, any day? If he were to die, and everything were to be divided! All that I have scraped together with such toil, for so many years. One half of it as good as flung into the gutter. Where would my wages be then? Michael is not fit to have control over money which has been earned by some one else. He does not understand the subject, and never will. He would take his share, marry that girl—if she would have him—and leave me with my life to begin over again. As for the factories, if he is fool enough to listen to Sir Thomas Winthrop, and repeat what he says, as if it were something worth thinking about—why, if he can do that, he is capable of following out Sir Thomas’s ideas too. It is enough to disgust any man, and discourage him from anything like real work,’ Gilbert went on to himself, ‘to think he has so precarious a hold as I have upon things which would not be existing now, but for his devotion. One ought to have some more secure prospect, if only to give one a little heart in one’s exertions.’