“Ah, the men who do that kind of thing are fools,” grumbled the Colonel. “Providence is too good to them when they are allowed to come home with a whole skin. I have no sympathy with any explorer since Columbus and Raleigh. After the discovery of America, tobacco, and potatoes, the rest is leather and prunella.”
“The Australian and Californian gold-fields were surely a good find,” suggested Vansittart.
“Has all the gold ever found there made you or me a shilling the richer, Mr. Vansittart? It has reduced the purchasing value of a sovereign by more than a third, and for men of fixed incomes all the world over those gold-fields have been a source of calamity. When I was a lad, a family man who was hard up could take his wife and children to France or Belgium, and live comfortably on the income he had been starving on in London. Now, life is dear everywhere—even in an out-of-the-way hole like this,” concluded the Colonel, savagely.
Vansittart observed him closely as he talked, and was all the better able to do so, as the Colonel was not given to looking at the person he addressed. He had a way of looking at the fire or at his boots while he talked. His enemies called it a hang-dog air.
He had not a pleasant face. It was a face wasted by dissolute habits, a face in which the lines were premature and deep, lines that told of discontent and sullen thought. Vansittart could but agree with Hubert Hartley’s estimate of Colonel Marchant. He was not a nice man. He was not a man to whom open-hearted men could take kindly.
But he was Eve’s father.
Vansittart had been sorry for her yesterday; sorry for her because of those narrow means which cut her off from the pleasures and privileges of youth and beauty. He was sorrier for her to-day, now that he had seen her father.
He took his tea by the family hearth, which had lost its air of rollicking happiness and Bohemian liberty. The five girls were all seated primly at the round table, silent for the most part, while the Colonel rambled on with his egotistical complaining, in the tones of a man maltreated alike by his Creator and by society.
“Sir Hubert Hartley has a fine place at Redwold,” he said, “and he got it dog-cheap. He is a very lucky man.”
“He’s an uncommonly good fellow,” said Vansittart, “and he ought to be an acquisition to the neighbourhood.”