“Dearest uncle! I cannot fall in love to order! I don’t much like the men I see,—they don’t want me, and I don’t want them. Leave me alone to work, dear uncle,—I love my work—I am useful—I can help a great many people to bear their troubles,—and it will be all right for me. If I am to marry, why, I shall,—if not, I shan’t.”
And she kissed him and slipped away.
Meanwhile, in the self-same monster metropolis of London, where Violet went daily to her work in the hospital—where the Major divided his days between his club and Miss Letty’s always charming house—and where Miss Letty herself, growing more feeble and ailing with years, was content to sit very much at home with her embroidery,—Boy, who had unconsciously been a link in the chain of their three lives, was drifting like a wreck in a vast ocean. The terrible blow of his expulsion from Sandhurst had been taken by his parents as a deadly injury to themselves,—and for the shame, the misery, the utter breaking-down of the lad’s own life and ambitions, they, his progenitors, took no thought and had no pity. The Honourable Jim, half-paralysed as he was, had plenty of strength left for swearing, and used oaths in plenty to his son, calling him a “d—— d low rascal.”
“You don’t seem to belong to me at all!” he shouted, his red face becoming purple with rage and excitement. “D——n it, sir, I am a gentleman—my father was a gentleman, but you—you are a blackguard, sir! D——n it!—when I took my glass I took it like a gentleman, I didn’t go about disgracing myself and my profession as you have done. You had better enlist if they’ll have you. Anyhow you must do something for your bread—I can’t afford to keep you!”
Boy heard in absolute silence. He was too completely scornful of life and the ways of life to care to remind his father that he himself had been one long disgrace to his son from that son’s babyhood—and that his paralytic condition was altogether owing to his indulgence in strong drink,—What was the good? More oaths and a redder face would be the sole result. And his mother? Had she one word of pardon or of sympathy for him in his deep humiliation? Not she! Embedded in fat, all she could do was to shake her double chin at him over a mountain of maternal bosom.
“It’s always the way,” she said, dabbing a handkerchief into her eyes, “when good mothers do everything for their sons! They have to suffer! You have broken my heart, Boy!—your mother’s heart! All my hopes of you are ruined! I don’t feel as if you were my Boy! I’m sure I don’t know what you are going to do. We have no fortune, as you are perfectly aware—we can’t afford to keep you idling about, doing nothing!”
Boy, tall, pale, handsome, and with an indefinable air of languor and scorn about him, smiled wearily.
“Don’t trouble yourself, mother!” he said. “I will earn enough bread to keep me alive, if I do it by sweeping a crossing. Good-bye!”
“Where are you going?” demanded his mother, somewhat frightened at his set face and blazing eyes.
“Do you care?” And he laughed bitterly. “I’m going—to the devil, I suppose!”