“Do you think I’m a failure, auntie?” asked he, facing her. “That was what he called me.”
She was extremely hurt and angry.
“A failure!” she cried. “Did any one ever hear the like? God forgive me for saying it of my brother, but what failure is more notorious than his own? A windy old clerk-soger with his name in a ballant, no more like his brothers than I’m like Duke George.”
“You do not deny it!” said Gilian simply.
She moved up to him and looked at him with an affection that was a transfiguration.
“My dear, my dear!” said she, “is there need for me to deny it? What are you yet but a laddie?”
He fingered the down upon his lip.
“But a laddie,” she repeated, determined not to see. “All the world’s before you, and a braw bonny world it is, for all its losses and its crosses. There is not a man of them at the inn door who would not willingly be in your shoes. The sour old remnants—do I not know them? Grant me patience with them!”
“It was General Turner’s word,” said Gilian, utterly unconsoled, and he wondered for a moment to see her flush.
“He might have had a kinder thought,” said she, “with his own affairs, as they tell me, much ajee, and Old Islay pressing for his loans. I’ll warrant you do not know anything of that, but it’s the clavers of the Crosswell.” She hurried on, glad to get upon a topic even so little away from what had vexed her darling. “Old Islay has his schemes, they say, to get Maam tacked on to his own tenancy of Drimlee and his son out of the army, and the biggest gentleman farmer in the shire. He has the ear of the Duke, and now he has Turner under his thumb. Oh my sorrow, what a place of greed and plot!”