Charlie was looking down on the table as he spoke, and tapping on it feverishly with the tips of his fingers. Harry’s countenance showed that unpleasant expression which sometimes overcame its rustic freshness. The attempt to discharge an unsuitable smile or a dubious expression from the face—the attempt, shall we bluntly say, of a rogue to look simple.
It is a loose way of talking and thinking which limits the vice of hypocrisy to the matter of religion. It counterfeits all good, and dissimulates all evil, every day and hour; and among the men who frankly admit themselves to be publicans and sinners, whose ways are notoriously worldly, and who never affected religion, are some of the worst and meanest hypocrites on earth.
Harry Fairfield having ended his luncheon, had laid his knife and fork on his plate, and leaning back in his chair, was ogling them with an unmeaning stare, and mouth a little open, affecting a brown study; but no effort can quite hide the meaning and twinkle of cunning, and nothing is more repulsive than this semi-transparent mask of simplicity.
Thus the two brothers sat, neither observing the other much, with an outward seeming of sympathy, but with very divergent thoughts.
Charles, as we know, was a lazy man, with little suspicion, and rather an admiration of his brother’s worldly wisdom and activity—with a wavering belief in Harry’s devotion to his cause, sometimes a little disturbed when Harry seemed for a short time hard and selfish, or careless, but generally returning with a quiet self-assertion, like the tide on a summer day.
For my part I don’t exactly know how much or how little Harry cared for Charles. The Fairfields were not always what is termed a “united” family, and its individual members, in prosecuting their several objects, sometimes knocked together, and occasionally, in the family history, more violently and literally than was altogether seemly.
CHAPTER XXI.
HARRY’S BEER AND CONVERSATION.
At last Harry, looking out of the window as he leaned back in his chair, said, in a careless sort of way, but in a low tone—
“Did you ever tell Alice anything about it before you came here?”
“Alice?” said Charles, wincing and looking very pale. “Well, you know, why should I?”