Until I arrived to keep her company my mother had been thrown almost entirely on her own resources, and the reason of this loneliness is also the reason of my strange career. They are inseparable one from the other.
My mother had married beneath her. Her father had been a solicitor in a fair way of business, blessed with one son and one daughter. They were not rich but they were gentlefolk, and by descent something more. In fact, only nine lives stood between my mother’s brother and one of the most ancient peerages in the United Kingdom.
My mother’s maiden name was Gascoyne, and her father was the great-grandson of a younger son. Her father’s family had for the last two generations drifted away from, and ceased to have any acquaintance with, the main and aristocratic branch of the family. Beyond a couple of ancestral portraits, the one of Lord George Gascoyne, my mother’s great-grandfather, and the other of that spendthrift’s wife, there was no visible evidence that they were in any way of superior social extraction to their well-to-do but suburban surroundings.
My father and mother were brought together in this way. My mother’s brother belonged to a cricket club of which my father was also a member. The two struck up a friendship, although at a first glance there could appear to be very little in common between the successful solicitor’s heir and the junior clerk in a wholesale city house. My father, however, had a gift of music which recommended him strongly to his new friend, and, as my mother always said, a natural refinement of manner which made him a quite possible guest at the quasi-aristocratic house of the Gascoynes.
“Perhaps I was sentimental and foolish,” my mother would say, with that quiet, unemotional voice of hers which caused strangers to doubt whether she could ever be either, “but he had such beautiful eyes and played in such an unaffected, dreamy way. And he was so good,” she would add, as if this were the quality which in the end had impressed her most. “He might have been much better off than he was, only he never could do anything underhand or mean. I don’t think such things ever even tempted him. He was simply above them.”
My father became a great favourite with the household till he committed the intolerable impertinence of falling in love with Miss Gascoyne. From the position of an ever welcome guest he descended to that of a “presuming little Jewish quill-driver,” as my uncle—whose friendship for him had always been of a somewhat patronising order—described him.
In fact, my uncle was considerably more bitter in denouncing his presumption than my grandfather, who, his first irritation over, went so far as to suggest that the best should be made of a bad job, and that they should turn him into a lawyer, urging his nationality as a plea that his admission into the firm was not likely to do any harm.
But my uncle was certainly right in receiving such a proposal with derision.
“He hasn’t even got the qualities of his race,” he said—although this very fact had been, till their quarrel, a constantly reiterated argument in my father’s favour.
My father and mother were forbidden to meet, and so one Sunday morning—Sunday being the only day on which my father could devote the whole day to so important an event—my mother stole out of the house and they were married before morning service, on a prospective income of a hundred a year. As mad a piece of sentimental folly as was ever perpetrated by a pair of foolish lovers.