“If you refuse to advance me my own money, I will only accept yours as a loan!” declared Gerard. “I shall repay you the instant I come of age!”
“As you please,” shrugged Rotherham, unlocking the strongbox.
“And I will give you my note-of-hand!”
“By all means. You’ll find a pen on my desk.”
Gerard cast him a look of acute loathing, snatched up a quill, dragged a sheet of paper at random from a sheaf, and in trembling haste wrote a promise to pay. He then flung the quill down, and said: “I shall meet that on the day I gain possession of my principal at latest! And, if I can contrive it, much sooner! I’m obliged to you! Goodbye!”
He then crammed the bills held out to him into his pocket, and hurried out of the room, slamming the door behind him. Rotherham put his strong-box away, and walked slowly back to his desk. He picked up the note-of-hand, and began, abstractedly, to tear it into small shreds, his brows lowering, and his lips compressed. The door opened again, and he glanced up quickly.
It was his steward who had entered, and who said in a quiet but resolute voice: “My lord, you will please allow me to have speech with you!”
“Well?”
“I saw Mr Gerard as he left the house, my lord. It is not for me to remonstrate with you, but since there is no one else to do it, I must! You must not let him go like that!”
“I’m damned glad he has gone. My temper will stand no more of him!”
“My lord, this will not do! He is your ward, remember! I have never seen such a look on his face before. What did you do to him, to make him as white as his shirt?”
“What the devil do you suppose I did to a whey-faced weakling I could control with my right hand tied behind me?” demanded Rotherham wrathfully.
“Not that you used your strength, my lord, but your tongue!”
“Yes, I used that to some purpose,” said Rotherham, with a grim smile.
“My lord, whatever he may have done—”
“He has done nothing. I doubt if he has the spirit to do anything but nauseate me with his gasconades and his fustian theatrics!”
“Let me fetch him back!” Wilton begged. “You should not frighten him so!”
“I should not be able to frighten him so!”
“You frighten many people, my lord. It has sometimes seemed to me that when your black mood is on you it is your wish to frighten people. But I am sure I don’t know why, for you can never tolerate anyone who fears you.”
Rotherham looked up quickly, a reluctant laugh escaping him. “True!”
“It is not too late: let me fetch Mr Gerard back!”
“No. I should not have flayed him, I acknowledge, but the temptation to do so was irresistible. It will do him no harm, and may do him a great deal of good.”
“My lord—”
“Wilton, I have a considerable regard for you, but you have not the power to make me change my mind!”
“I know that, my lord,” Wilton said. “There was only one person who ever had that power.”
Danger flickered in Rotherham’s eyes, but he did not speak. The steward looked steadily at him for a moment, and then turned, and walked out of the room.
18
Mr Monksleigh reached Bath after dark, and in a thrasonical mood. When he had given the order to the post-boy to take the Bath road, he had done so in the white heat of his rage, but with a quake of fear in his heart. The experience he had passed through had set every nerve in his slight body quivering, for although he had been stung to fury by the lash of Rotherham’s tongue only pride had kept him from breaking down, and betraying the terror beneath his bravado. He was both timid and abnormally sensitive; and from having a keen and often morbid imagination was apt to fancy that persons who, in fact, never gave him a thought were criticizing him unkindly. Anticipation was more dreadful to him than performance; and to be harshly rated turned him sick. A wish to appear to be of consequence was unhappily allied to a lack of self-confidence which he tried to conceal under a boastful manner; and nothing could more surely have won for him the contempt of his guardian. There was never a more ill-assorted pair; and if Gerard was the last boy alive to appeal to Rotherham, no worse guardian than Rotherham could well have been found for a boy compact of timidity and vainglory. A much younger Gerard, at once anxious to impress an almost unknown guardian and afraid that he would be despised by him, encountered a look from those hard, bright eyes, and wilted under it. It was neither angry nor disdainful; it was almost incurious, but it utterly disconcerted Gerard. He had the feeling that it pierced right into his mind, and saw everything that he most wished to hide; and he never recovered from that first, disastrous meeting. Rotherham indifferent made him feel ill-at-ease; when, later, he saw Rotherham angry, he was terrified. A natural abruptness he mistook for a sign of dislike; he read a threat into every curt command; and if he was reprimanded, he was always sure that the brief but shattering scold was but the prelude to hideous retribution. The fact that on the only occasion when condign retribution had fallen upon him it was neither hideous nor even particularly severe quite irrationally failed to reassure him. He thought it a miracle that he had been let off lightly, just as he was convinced, every time he annoyed Rotherham, that he had escaped chastisement by no more than a hairsbreadth.
It was doubtful if Rotherham, with his nerves of steel, his tireless strength, and his impatience of weakness, would ever have felt much liking for so delicate and nervous a boy as Gerard; but he would not have been intolerant of him had it not been for Gerard’s unfortunate tendency to brag about himself. In the early days of his guardianship, he had frequently invited him to one or other of his country seats, feeling that however great a nuisance a schoolboy might be to him it was clearly his duty to take an interest in him, giving him a day’s hunting, teaching him how to handle a gun, or cast a line, and how to keep a straight left. He very soon realized that Gerard, so far from being grateful, regarded these benefits in the light of severe ordeals, and would have become merely bored had he not heard Gerard, after an ignominious day in the saddle, during the course of which he had contrived to evade all but the easiest of jumps, boasting to one of the servants of the regular raspers he had taken. Rotherham, caring nothing for anyone’s admiration or disapproval, and contemptuous of shams, was violently exasperated, and thereafter regarded his ward not with indifference but with scorn. Even Gerard’s docility irritated him. He preferred the more resilient Charles, whose predilection for getting into all the more damaging and perilous forms of mischief had made him declare that never again would he have the whelp to stay with him. But as soon as Charles had outgrown his destructive puppyhood he had every intention of opening his doors to him, and of taking him in hand. Charles provoked him to anger, but never to contempt. Severely castigated for setting a booby-trap for the butler, which resulted in a splendid breakage of crockery, the chances were that he would bounce into the room not half an hour later, announcing in conscience-stricken accents that he feared he had killed one of the peacocks with his bow and arrow. He found nothing unnerving in the look that made his elder brother shake in his shoes; and when threatened with frightful penalties he grinned. He was outrageously mischievous, maddeningly obstinate, and wholly averse from respecting prohibitions; and since these characteristics never failed to rouse his guardian to wrath neither Gerard nor Mrs Monksleigh could understand why he was quite unafraid of Rotherham, or why Rotherham, however angry, never withered him with the remarks which made Gerard writhe.