“’Cause he’d done all his money!” he thought indignantly. But how good it was of Harry with no money to keep his word and buy Cuckoopint!
His tutor came in and found him crying; poor Jack had the penalty of position—he was never left alone.
The tutor asked in a rather dry tone what was the matter. Jack, ashamed of his grief, brushed the hot tears from his eyelashes and tried to check his sobs.
“It is quite a personal matter,” he said with much dignity as he steadied his sobs. “It doesn’t concern anybody but me. Please don’t ask.”
The tutor, though a severe man, had some tact and judgment; he did not ask, but took a volume from one of the shelves and went out of the room.
To his mother it was convenient and agreeable that Brancepeth was out of London. She was not sensitive, but still it had been disagreeable to her to see him there when she had broken with him. Ruptures have always this unpleasantness, that people notice them.
But he was away at the other end of the world, where they all went when they were in trouble, and where they were as good as dead—somewhere distant and barbarous—and in being so he showed more tact than usual, for with that loveliest and most useful of all qualities he had not been gifted. When she thought of his parting words to her she wished a lion or a bison to make an end of him.
She had been fond of him certainly a good many years, but in women of her disposition a wound to self-esteem is the death of affection. Their love is rooted in their vanity, and you cannot offend the latter without killing that which springs from it. At times she wished that he were there that she could make him murder William Massarene; but then murder was unknown in her world, and she could not have told him what made her wish the brute stuck in the throat like a Pyrenean boar; and so things were best as they were.
Poor Harry; if he had remained in England, he would only have been an additional complication. He would have seen, as this horrible brute saw, that shame and disgust and terror were ageing her fast and painfully.