"To your sisters. And Joanna"—Adrian hesitated, conscious of a singular distaste to using the Christian name—"at once devoted a considerable sum of money to be employed, in the event of your return, for your maintenance."
With his coarse, thick-jointed fingers Smyrthwaite rubbed a bit of bread round his plate, sopping up the remains of the gravy.
"That's no more than right," he said, "if you come to think of it. Why should the girls have all the stuff?"
His hand went out furtively across the table to a dish of braised beef and richly cooked vegetables which he proceeded to transfer to his own plate.
"All the same, it's nice of Nannie. We were rather chummy in the old days—the blasted old days which I've nearly forgot. But I didn't suppose she cared still. Poor old Nannie! What a beastly hash my father made of our lives! Nannie ought to have married Merriman. Then I should have had a home. Andrew's a bit peachy, but he's a rare good sort."
He slushed in the food silently for a while; and Adrian, anxious to avoid observation of the details of that process, watched the kittens sporting round the flower-pots on the flags just outside.
He had searched for Bibby, spending time, money, even risking personal safety, in that search. He had found Bibby. He had brought him here to civilized quarters. He had clothed him from head to foot.—Adrian felt a pang, for they were such nice clothes! He was rather fond of that particular flannel suit. Really it cost him not a little to part with it; and, he could almost fancy, hanging now upon Bibby's angular, narrow-chested frame, that it bore the plaintive air of a thing unkindly treated, consciously humiliated and disgraced. He apologized to it half sentimentally, half humorously, in spirit.—And then because the small things of life whip one's sense of the great ones into higher activity, the trivial matter of the ill-used flannel suit brought home to Adrian with disquieting clearness the difficulties of this whole third affaire Smyrthwaite in which he had, as it now occurred to him, rather recklessly embarked.
As if the two first affaires, those of father and daughter, hadn't been enough, he must needs go and add that of the degenerate son and brother! And who, after all, would thank him? Wasn't he very much a fool, then, for his pains? Psychologically and in the abstract, as an example of lapse and degradation, Smyrthwaite presented an interesting and instructive study. But in the concrete, as a guest, a companion, as a young man, a relation, moreover, to be reclaimed from evil courses and socially reinstated, the situation took on quite other color. Looking across the table now as, his plate again empty, Bibby sank back in his chair, slouched together, his hands in his trousers pockets, his blue eyes turned upon the door, anxiously awaiting the advent of the garçon with the next course, Adrian was tempted to deplore his own philanthropic impulse. All hope of pulling the boy up to any permanently decent level of living seemed so unspeakably remote.
And, as though some silent transmission of thought had taken place between them, Bibby's next speech went to confirm Adrian's fears.
"You say if I choose," he began; "but the question is, can I choose? You see I'm so beastly out of the habit of all that.—Now I'm getting full I seem to understand things, so I'd best talk at once."