Love and hatred

by Marie Belloc Lowndes

"GODFREY can't eat me! Besides, he'll have to see me some time. Not that I want to see anything of the fellow—I always hated him! Still, as things are, it's far better I should take him by surprise, in Laura's house, than go cap in hand, and ask his leave to see my sister."

It was Gilbert Baynton who was speaking, standing with his legs a little apart, his fair head thrown back, his hands in his pockets, early in the afternoon of the day he and Oliver had arrived from London.

Mother and son were both in the room, but it was really with Mrs. Tropenell that Baynton was having this rather unpleasant argument. He and Tropenell had had this all out before. Oliver had wanted Gillie to write to his sister, but he was set on taking her by surprise, and on stealing a march on Godfrey Pavely.

Mrs. Tropenell looked up at the man standing before her. Gillie was two years older than her Oliver, and she had been the first woman who had ever seen him, for it was to her that his mother's doctor had handed the lusty, already screaming baby. His mother had passionately loved him—loved him and spoilt him, and so had his rather lackadaisical father. Physically he was a queer mixture of the two. Gillie Baynton had his father's fair hair, grace of limb and movement, and plainness of feature, coupled with his mother's abounding vitality, and her charm of manner—that charm, that coming-on-ness, which his beautiful sister, born so many years later, had always lacked.

Gillie had early begun to get into various ugly scrapes, but as a youth he had always somehow managed to shuffle out of them, for he was popular, and "had a way with him," as country people say. Also he had never been lacking in courage of a sort, and courage carries even a rascal a long way.

Still, Gillie Baynton had been pretty well done for, as far as his own country was concerned, when he had been sent out, as a kind of forlorn hope, to Mexico and Oliver Tropenell....

Gillie began speaking again: "I think I know my worthy brother-in-law quite as well as you do, Mrs. Tropenell. It's much better to take a man like that by surprise, and not to give him time to think! After all, he's got to let bygones be bygones."

And now Oliver interposed, for the first time. "Yes, mother, as things are, I think Gillie had perhaps better try and see Laura now, at once, before Godfrey Pavely knows he's in England."

"I'll go there right now."

Occasionally, not very often, Gilbert Baynton made use of some little phrase showing that he lived on the other side of the Atlantic. He had changed somehow, Mrs. Tropenell could hardly have told you how, for he had always had a very assured manner. But now Gillie looked what he was—a very prosperous man of business, though scarcely an English man of business. The long sojourn in Mexico had not altered her Oliver at all—not, that is, as far as she could see, but it had altered Gillie Baynton surprisingly. It had roughened him, and increased his natural self-assurance.