While Colonel Sutherland occupied himself with these reflections, Horace, totally unconscious of criticisms upon himself, which would have stung his self-love deeply, pondered, in his turn, the best means of bringing his uncle over to the length of helping him, by any means or in any way, to escape from Marchmain. The most palpable mode of entering on the subject—that of lamenting his father’s want of hospitality—had been made impracticable by Colonel Sutherland, who laid all the weight of the arrangement upon his own convenience; and his simplicity and straightforwardness made a sidelong approach to it equally out of the question. Horace was compelled, accordingly, to bring in his subject all at once, and without introduction. Colonel Sutherland, without meaning it, said something half consciously about the dreary country, and his nephew seized upon the chance.
“Dreary, indeed!—and nothing else do we see, uncle, from year’s end to year’s end!” cried Horace. “Is it not enough to kill a man?—without a human face to break it, either; and here am I, strong and young, condemned to this life, and kept from any information—any advice—which can direct me what to do. Uncle, you are the only friend I have been able to see with freedom and confidence, and I am almost glad you don’t stay at Marchmain—for there is no freedom there. Tell me, I beg of you, what can I do?”
“My dear boy!” cried the Colonel, grasping his nephew’s hand in sudden sympathy, and with a little gasp of earnest attention—“you take away my breath. Solitude has not diminished your energy, at all events. Do? Why, to be sure, a boy like you can do anything. We must look for an opening, that is all—but you should have begun before now.”
“My father,” said Horace, with unconscious bitterness, “has stopped that. I don’t know anything about the world, except this paltry little world here, of gamekeepers and poachers, and sporting farmers’ sons—for gentlemen, of course, don’t associate with me. What are we, uncle?—nobodies? I can’t tell—my father keeps up habits which look like the relics of a better time—and at the same time I know we’re poor; but he throws no light upon our unhappy circumstances. He keeps me shut up in this horrible house, till I think all sorts of horrors: that he’s a returned convict, or something like that—that our name’s a disgrace. What is it?—of course there must be some cause for this seclusion—and you must know.”
Colonel Sutherland was much embarrassed. He fumbled with his cloak in the first place to gain time, and then, finding no other resource, fell back upon the shelter of his deafness.
“I’m a little hard of hearing,” said the Colonel. “I partly lost your last observation—but what’s that about the poachers and gamekeepers? Bad company, Horace!—unfit associates, except in the way of sport, for any gentleman. I’ve known lads of good family ruined just by an inclination that way. Not that they meant ill to begin with; but what’s mere fun at first comes to be liking before long—and a gentleman’s son of course is flattered and courted among them. It’s a pernicious thing, Horace—attend to me!—it’s been the ruin of many a man.”
“What is ruin, uncle?” shouted Horace, with a wild and bitter smile, which somehow mingling congenially with the wind and the chill, carried into the Colonel’s mind a singular identification of that landscape and scene which gained their climax in this moment. He was startled, he could not explain how. He turned round to look into his nephew’s face, with a sudden consciousness of depths in the heart and in the life of Horace undecipherable and mysterious to himself.
“My dear boy,” he said, with a little tremble in his voice, “ruin is such a destruction as can be accomplished only by a man himself.”
Horace made no answer. His face subsided gradually, out of that self-revelation, into the assumed good-humour which he had put on for his uncle’s benefit. Colonel Sutherland, however, continued to regard him with concern and apprehension. The Colonel’s mind was not enlightened up to the pitch of modern times. When his imagination uncomfortably pictured Horace seated, perhaps, in the alehouse they had passed, with the gamekeeper or sporting men of the village, it was not the knowledge of life which the young man might acquire, but the old-fashioned horror of “bad society,” which moved the thoughts of the uncle, who secretly in his own mind began to attribute something of the slouching gait and unsatisfactory bearing of his nephew to his unsuitable companions. He could not give up the subject, but partly in natural anxiety, and partly to evade the youth’s troublesome questions, recurred to it immediately again.
“I am your oldest relation except your father, Horace,” said the Colonel. “I have some experience in life. You know what the proverb says: ‘A man is known by the company he keeps.’ ”