Archibald worshipped his mother with a worship worthy of a better object, and in his eldest brother he believed with that touching faith which would be pathetic were it not irritating, which single-minded, honest men will persist occasionally on lavishing on rogues and vagabonds.
Not that Richard Halling came precisely under either category. He was a man who, while he wilfully deceived himself, was too selfish to understand his deceit might chance to prove the ruin of other people.
He ran into debt meaning to repay; he borrowed money intending to return; he took the roads which pleased him best, and let others settle for the cost of conveyance and maintenance, with the full determination of making all their fortunes when he reached his goal. But, like other men of his temperament, he never reached that goal; he lay down by the way weary, and died, confessing himself a "gigantic failure," which, indeed, he was not, since he had never even striven to rise to any height; blessing his brother for his generous kindness; and lest that kindness should be in danger of rusting for want of exercise, leaving him in trust a son and daughter,—that son and daughter, in fact, of which Mr. Kleinwort had spoken in anything rather than flattering terms to Mr. Asherill.
Some time, however, before Mr. Halling—long a widower—went to rejoin his wife, Mortomley, motherless too late, had met the one woman of his life.
She would not have been every one's fancy, but she was his, and the way in which he chanced to meet with her was in this wise.
He had been working hard and fretting, in his own silent fashion, concerning the death of his mother, and these two causes combined found him, towards the beginning of a summer which was ever after stamped on his memory,—ill, languid, in poor health, and worse spirits.
Hitherto he had been wont to take his holidays at the sea-side, in Scotland, Ireland, or on the Continent; but on this occasion, when the doctors told him he required change and must have it, he elected to seek that change in Leicestershire, and look at the old acres and trees and houses which had formerly made the name of Mortomley a household one in the county.
The Mortomleys who had preceded this man, being nearer to the root of the family tree, felt only a vague gratification in being the son, grandson, and great-grandson of the last squire, but to the Archibald Mortomley of whom I am writing, the glories of his race, fast merging in the mists of distance, had been his thought and pride since earliest boyhood. If they were vanishing it was the more reason he should try to grasp them; if they were in danger of becoming mere memories of the past, there was all the more reason why he should strive to make them once again realities of the present.
From his mother he had inherited a pride of family which would have been at once ludicrous and intolerable, but that such pride, unlike that of wealth, rarely finds voice sufficient to proclaim itself. Herself, the daughter of one parvenu, and the widow of another, it was perhaps natural that after Mrs. Halling married Mortomley the elder, she should, when reckoning up his claims to social and personal consideration, have placed rather an undue value on the monuments, tablets, brasses, lists of doles, and other such like matters, which were still to be seen in Great Dassell Church, where the Mortomleys had once their great family pew, that now, with the lands and woods and manors, was merged in larger properties owned by mightier men than they had ever been.
And the reader may be quite sure that she instructed her son in all these matters. Not merely had he grown up to think his father the cleverest man in the world, his mother the wisest woman, his step-brother a model of what a brother and a son should be, but the Mortomley family as one of the first consideration; and, therefore, it is not, perhaps, a matter for astonishment, that when ill and out of spirits, he should try to recruit his health and improve his mental tone by visiting a place where those of his ancestors, who would have turned up their patrician noses at colour works and colour-makers, had, from cradle to grave, travelled that pleasant road which leads to ruin.