Mr. Gascoyne was essentially a business man, and it was my business qualities which appealed to him most. I had a natural gift for order and method, and although he was not given to praise, I detected a look of pleased surprise when I displayed some unusual perception of what was wanted in a particular situation. Lionel Holland, who at least seemed to have imbibed a wholesome fear of irritating me when we were together, could not witness my progress in the scale of prosperity without making an attempt to injure me in the eyes of my employer.
It appeared that he knew a fellow-clerk of mine, a youth who considered that I had ousted him from the place which should in time have been his. I had not been in the office a couple of hours before I grasped this fact. He was a pleasant fellow enough in an ordinary way, but his disappointment had brought out—as far as his relations towards me were concerned—his worst points. He had a slight acquaintance with Lionel Holland. This acquaintance the latter improved upon, and I was not a little surprised to find Harry Cust one Sunday afternoon sitting in the Hallwards’ drawing-room. He was staying with Lionel from Saturday till Monday, and I think it gave his host infinite pleasure to introduce him where I had been known from childhood—though what particular satisfaction it was to him I could not quite see.
I soon realised that my life’s history was in the possession of my fellow-clerks. I was too much in favour with Mr. Gascoyne for them to venture to show the contempt they felt because my mother had let lodgings. I would have been glad if one of them had had the temerity to throw it in my teeth, for an insult to my dead mother would have found me a perfectly normal person with an absolutely primal sense of loyalty.
Chapter IX
I missed no opportunity of finding out every detail of young Henry Gascoyne’s college career. From all accounts he must have been surprisingly lazy, for no one ever spoke of him without giving him credit for great abilities. He was at Magdalen, had just scraped through his Mods at the end of his second year, and had then apparently given up any idea of serious work, for in a few months his devotion to pleasure and his defiance of college rules became so acute that he was ignominiously sent down. A few days after this auspicious ending to his career as a student, I met him riding in the neighbourhood of his New Forest home with a most cheerful countenance, and humming a tune. I was on my bicycle, and later I came across him again in a by-lane down which I had turned with the object of smoking a pipe. My appearance was quite unexpected and a little awkward. His horse was tethered to a gate, and folded in his arms was a remarkably pretty girl of the cottager class. I wondered if all the human obstacles between myself and the Gascoyne earldom were engaged in surreptitious love affairs.
The girl drew back hastily and hid her face, but not before I detected that she had been crying. I was walking my bicycle, and was a little annoyed that Henry Gascoyne had had such a good opportunity of seeing me. He was evidently thoroughly wasting his time from the worldly point of view, though I should probably have agreed—had he put the matter to me—that he was making the best of his youth.
He was not exactly handsome, but he had a colouring which, despite his dissipated life, gave assurance of clean blood. He was well made, and had hair the colour of ripe corn. Notwithstanding, however, his eminently healthy appearance his self-indulgence had absolutely no limitations except such as were prescribed by good form, and he was prepared to leap even this boundary if he could do so without danger of being seen.
He had the misfortune to be cursed until seventy times seven with the forgiveness of his friends; Harry Gascoyne was not a person they could be angry with for long. He had been known to steal a man’s mistress and yet retain his friendship, and as I saw him that summer morning, booted and spurred, playing with the little cottage maiden as a cat might have done with a mouse, the indulgence he managed to secure for himself from his fellow-men was not difficult to understand.
I knew that his next move would be London. A young man with means and no one to control his actions is as sure to gravitate towards London as the lizard is to seek the sun. His sister, who should have been the man, urged a profession, suggesting the army, but Harry Gascoyne kicked at the mere idea of a life of routine and discipline. This much I had gathered at the tiny little inn half a mile from the Gascoynes’ house, which was much frequented by the old man who combined for them the office of indoor and outdoor factotum. The keeper of the public-house itself had been placed in his present position by Harry Gascoyne’s father, so that the establishment quite partook of the character of a feudal outpost. In addition, the landlady had been cook at the Grange.
“ ’E’ll never do no work, won’t Mr. ’Arry,” said the old factotum, as he smoked his pipe on the wooden seat by the doorway and surveyed the pines etched black against the crimson flush of the setting sun.