Mr. Floyd had a way of listening which made me yearn to tell him every insignificant detail of my life. I knew that he was a man of national reputation, but I hardly cared for that, since he was the pleasantest companion I had ever met. I found myself gossiping to him about our village worthies, making him laugh heartily at their sayings passed into tradition and fable among us boys; for our one-eyed shoemaker and our corpulent grocer, like many other country wits to fortune and to fame unknown, surpassed either Douglas Jerrold or Sydney Smith in quip and drollery. And I did not omit George Lenox, for all Belfield except his wife was in the secret of his affairs, and they were our crowning joke, in which poor George himself joined merrily, although the story was so against himself.
"That girl of his is remarkably pretty," said Mr. Floyd. "Is he, then, so poor? He was well born, liberally educated, and married in a family of high pretensions."
There could be no doubt but what George Lenox had begun better than other men, with enough to live on comfortably in city or country, provided he did not think too much of the necessity for showing his wife that she had not lessened her consequence in marrying him. Nobody could accuse poor Mr. Lenox now-a-days of ambition, or blame him if, in those early days as now, that terrible woman had frankly regarded him as an utter nonentity save in his association with her own destiny. She was a handsome woman, with aquiline nose, a thin, firmly-set mouth, piercing eyes and a magnificent carriage. She was no longer young when she had accepted Mr. Lenox, and by what means she had encompassed his subjugation we were never told: he always shook his head when he alluded to his courtship. "A fellow is wax in a woman's hands," he had sometimes remarked darkly. But after his marriage he had seemed to acquiesce in his wife's belief in her high individual value to the world in general and himself in particular, and had given her the best of everything. Mrs. Lenox knew how to spend money, she had a house in New York and a villa in Belfield; she had running accounts with tradesmen; and not only gave dinner-parties, balls and receptions, but out-dressed her circle with a sort of gorgeous superfluity which made her intimates experience the ignominy of their inferiority. Mr. Lenox resigned himself to the irresistible current of his wife's will, and if he felt inward doubts silenced them as suggestions of morbid distrust in the discretion of a woman whom he knew to be virtuous, and whose price was so much above rubies that sordid calculations ought not to be mentioned in the same breath with her. After a time, however, not even his high faith in the necessity of agreeable issues where she was concerned could blind him to the fact that he had many debts and but a few thousand dollars. He at once invested these thousands in an enterprise which was shortly to make all those interested in it millionaires. But if any one made money out of it, it was not George Lenox, who suddenly found himself reduced to be a pensioner upon his wife, who had twelve thousand dollars invested in railway stock. They removed to their little Gothic cottage in Belfield, and Mrs. Lenox lost what remained of her beauty, her spirits, her temper, but never her ineradicable pride. Within a year her husband had taken her railway stock, sold it and invested it in some speculation which failed ignominiously, as any schemes of his were sure to do. Nothing attracted him which was regulated by average laws of supply answering a demand: all his undertakings required a miracle, an upheaval of popular ideas, to ensure success. He never told his wife of this embezzlement of his: when he lost her property he meditated suicide, and merely staved off the evil day by pretending to pay her dividends regularly; and for this he twice a year implored the assistance of his uncle, Mr. Raymond. The railroad in which Mrs. Lenox had invested was a prosperous one, and occasionally declared an additional stock dividend: it was on these occasions that the reduced lady lost in a degree her usual air of picturesque gloom—that she roused herself to talk about her family and the glories of her youth, the éclat and brilliance of her position, which she had never lost until after marrying her unfortunate husband; and at such times she even regained her courage and made a round of visits, dropping glazed and ancient cards, and retaining in her feebleness all the traditions of her majesty. But this epoch of her revived grandeur was set in painful contrast to poor Lenox's misery. He was commissioned to sell the scrip, which, for him, had no existence, and thus raise money to deck the family in transient brightness. I fancy that at such times, without any waste of rhetoric or balancing of expediencies, he was more in love with suicide than Hamlet or Cato, and that if it had not been for the sympathy and aid of a golden-haired little girl he would have swallowed his death-potion quietly. Georgy was his firm ally against her mother, and helped him shrewdly in many a close pinch; and his rich uncle, Mr. Raymond (Mr. Floyd's father-in-law), rarely refused him provisional aid upon his application, although he was wise enough to decline helping him in any of his fantastic kite speculations.
"And what sort of a girl is this Miss Georgy?" inquired Mr. Floyd. "Has she been injured at all by the somewhat exceptional circumstances of her family?"
"Oh no, sir."
"Is she gentle, generous and open in her ways?"
"Gentle, sir—generous?"
"She is remarkably pretty."
I assented eagerly to this observation, and he laughed: "There is no doubt in your mind upon that point. If she were in all respects a suitable companion for Helen, I would request that she should be invited to The Headlands. But Tony will find out what she is made of. He will be a new friend for you."
And he told me about this Antonio Thorpe, who had been under his guardianship for six years. He was the son of an Englishman who had married a Spanish girl in the West Indies: the lad was but twelve years old when he was thrown upon the world without parents or near relatives or suitable provision for his maintenance. The elder Thorpe had been a careless, good-natured person, without any distrust of his fellows, and not knowing what to do with his son had thrust him upon Mr. Floyd, who had at some trouble and expense looked after his education. He had entered college the year before, but his conduct had been a little unsatisfactory to the authorities, and his guardian had withdrawn him, and now, in some doubt as to the best course to pursue in regard to his future, wished him to study for a few months quietly at Belfield.