“Miss Edith be more like ’er mother. A nice lady but a bit close.”
“It was as well one of ’em wur close or there wouldn’t ’ave been much left.”
“True.”
There was a whole family history in these few remarks. A man born rich, but a rake, and possibly a profligate—a long-suffering wife enduring the slur of meanness in her efforts to save something from the wreck. Indeed, it appeared a wonder that she should have saved so much.
Evidently young Gascoyne took after his father. I gathered afterwards that the reason there was anything in the nature of estate left was because the money and house had been largely the property of Mr. Gascoyne’s wife, and it was through her forethought that the boy and girl had been left equally well off.
“A girl’s natural protector is her brother,” her husband had said when he and his wife were discussing the matter. “It is natural the boy should be better off than his sister. If it is otherwise it puts the lad in a humiliating position.” Mrs. Gascoyne, however, did not think so. She had absolute confidence in the girl’s affection for her brother, whilst from early boyhood she had detected a singular likeness between the lad and his father. Yet although she trusted the girl, it was possible that she loved the boy more. Indeed, it was her very love that caused her to make provision for him in his sister’s affection and rectitude.
All this I learned by degrees.
I learned also that the girl I had seen in his arms was something better than a cottager. She was the daughter of a blacksmith who was fairly well-to-do, and it was a tribute to young Gascoyne’s courage that she possessed not only a father, but half a dozen stalwart brothers, who would most probably have killed him at sight could they have witnessed the embrace that summer morning in the lane. As I sat smoking my pipe in the perfect summer night, with the fragrant perfume of pine and tobacco mingling, I heard someone coming along the narrow strip of white road bordered with grass, whistling.
It was young Gascoyne on his way home.
It was evident that so far satiety had not begun to knock at the doors of conscience, for a more careless, happy creature it would have been impossible to imagine.