Hugh took the letter from Dora’s hand and read it through.
“I can get on without his money, my dears,” he said, bravely.
“Of course you can,” said Alicia, proudly. “A Colman need not be beholden to any man. But that does not condone anything in your uncle’s behaviour.”
He rose with a laugh, curled his moustache to a fiercer angle, and put his arm round Dora’s shoulder, who was standing, and addressed Alicia.
“What does it matter? Don’t trouble your dear kind heads about it. I’m sorry for the poor old chap. He was kind to me when a boy—has done more for me than I ever did for him. I came to see how you two were getting on, and to comfort my heart with a bottle of grandfather’s old Madeira. So let us be happy.”
“What a dear, noble fellow you are, to take it like that,” said Dora, kissing him.
“My dear child,” he replied, with a laugh, “how often am I to tell you that I am not a graven image?”
He did not feel at all noble. On the contrary, very ignominiously disappointed. His iridescent scheme had vanished like a soap-bubble. Geoffrey Colman had intimated, in his letter, with much deprecatory circumlocution, that, on looking lately into his affairs, he found them by no means as prosperous as he had imagined; there were depreciations in lands, unlucky investments, mortgages; in fine, much as he had desired it, he would be able to do nothing at all for Hugh. And then he was practically moribund.
Hugh shrugged off the disappointment. To ask his sisters for a loan out of their comparatively small fortune, upon no security more tangible than the promise of his brotherly efforts to repay them, was absolutely impossible. One comfort remained, for which he thanked the god of chance: the opportune arrival of the letter had effectually precluded his proposal.
He returned to London, where a sudden stress of work awaited him. But the briefs of a criminal advocate, chiefly engaged in small cases, are not marked very high. Moreover, ill-luck attended him. After three of his clients were convicted, he made desperate efforts to secure a favourable verdict for a fourth, and his failure roused his exasperation. His book of poems came out just at this time, to be less glowingly received by literary journals than the two previous ones. They complained of tenuity of thought, over-elaboration; advised, finally, a robuster view, a franker acceptance of the emotional facts of life. He threw his press-cuttings angrily into the waste-paper basket. What did the fools know about it? It was the only sphere in which he could divest himself of his accursed emotionality. He turned to Irene. Yet even her tribute fell short of its customary wholeness. She noticed a tendency towards the symbolism of the modern French school in his new volume. She quoted a line, said it suggested Stéphane Mallarmé. Hugh broke out tempestuously.