“And shall have mutually cursed each other and gone our separate ways, until the time arrives for another reconciliation. That’s our gentle method of getting through life. At the present moment we are amiability itself; but how long it will last it is quite impossible to say. Do you think we can manage a week here, Comethup? It’s not a very expensive place, and the wines, which are atrocious, are not at all dear. What do you say?”
“Well, that’s for you to say,” responded Comethup.
“Pardon me,” interrupted his uncle, “it is for you to say. In our present embarrassed circumstances, we wait—I may say, with hopes which are certain to be realized—we wait on the word of one who has ever proved our friend. I say it not without emotion; I have recollections of many occasions on which——”
Brian broke in boisterously. “Here, for Heaven’s sake, don’t start a sermon, dad! Comethup doesn’t want it, and it won’t improve me; and you, for your part, don’t mean a word of it. Comethup quite understands the circumstances—don’t you, old chap?”
“Yes, yes,” replied Comethup hurriedly. “I’m in rather—rather a hurry, and if you will let me know——”
“How much we want?” Brian finished the hesitating sentence airily, and Comethup was grateful to him. “Well, suppose you let us have—dad’s an expensive chap to keep, and I don’t want to be forever worrying you—suppose you let us have a hundred. I’ll look after it myself, and be strictly economical; and long before it’s all gone my new book will be out and I shall have made my fortune. This next volume will certainly make my fortune—in an indefinable fashion, I feel sure of it.”
“Well, I haven’t so much money with me, of course,” said Comethup, “but I can give you a cheque, and they’ll clear it for you at the local bank, if that will do.”
“Excellently,” exclaimed Brian. “What a wonderfully generous fellow you are! Any one would think you had been sent expressly into the world to come to my aid at stated intervals and lift all worry from my shoulders. That you should be down here at this very hour—that’s the wonderful part of the business!”
Comethup wrote the cheque, and escaped as quickly as possible from their thanks. Mr. Robert Carlaw found it necessary to open the door for him, and even to accompany him down the stairs and through the bar, waving aside haughtily some common person who stood in the way. Outside, in the quiet moonlit street, he placed a hand on Comethup’s shoulder and looked at him and sighed.
“My dear nephew,” he said, “fortune has not been good to me. True, it has placed certain riches within my grasp; but Providence, on the other hand, has cursed me with a temperament which compels me to do all things greatly—on a large scale, as it were. I think I told you once that I felt I was meant to cut a figure—to loom large in the eye of the world. There are men cutting figures to-day who are but objects of contempt; they are not fitted, physically or mentally, for the parts they play. With me, it would have been different. I have, and I say it in all seriousness, tact, discernment, and a certain refinement, and—shall I say it?—delicacy, which all men do not possess. Yet I am a most unhappy man; I am growing old—no, do not attempt to contradict me; I feel that I am growing old—and I am compelled to seek my bread in the most precarious fashion—to be dependent even on the whim of my own son.” He lowered his voice, and glanced toward the inn door. “This money you have been generous enough to place in his hands—no doubt he will spend it with what wisdom he can, but I—I shall see nothing of it. And you must be aware that there are services rendered to me daily—by servants and others in humble positions—for which a gentleman must pay, if he would keep clear that distinction which is necessary between class and mass. You grasp my meaning?”