"Australia! Why, Osborne, what could you do there? And leave my
father! I hope you'll never get your hundred pounds, if that's the
use you're to make of it! Why, you'd break the Squire's heart."
"It might have done once," said Osborne, gloomily, "but it wouldn't
now. He looks at me askance, and shies away from conversation with
me. Let me alone for noticing and feeling this kind of thing. It's
this very susceptibility to outward things that gives me what faculty
I have; and it seems to me as if my bread, and my wife's too, were to
depend upon it. You'll soon see for yourself the terms which I am on
with my father!"
Roger did soon see. His father had slipped into a habit of silence
at meal-times--a habit which Osborne, who was troubled and anxious
enough for his own part, had not striven to break. Father and son
sate together, and exchanged all the necessary speeches connected
with the occasion civilly enough; but it was a relief to them when
their intercourse was over, and they separated--the father to brood
over his sorrow and his disappointment, which were real and deep
enough, and the injury he had received from his boy, which was
exaggerated in his mind by his ignorance of the actual steps Osborne
had taken to raise money. If the money-lenders had calculated the
chances of his father's life or death in making their bargain,
Osborne himself had thought only of how soon and how easily he could
get the money requisite for clearing him from all imperious claims
at Cambridge, and for enabling him to follow Aimée to her home in
Alsace, and for the subsequent marriage. As yet, Roger had never seen
his brother's wife; indeed, he had only been taken into Osborne's
full confidence after all was decided in which his advice could have
been useful. And now, in the enforced separation, Osborne's whole
thought, both the poetical and practical sides of his mind, ran
upon the little wife who was passing her lonely days in farmhouse
lodgings, wondering when her bridegroom husband would come to her
next. With such an engrossing subject, it was, perhaps, no wonder
that he unconsciously neglected his father; but it was none the less
sad at the time, and to be regretted in its consequences.
"I may come in and have a pipe with you, sir, mayn't I?" said Roger,
that first evening, pushing gently against the study-door, which his
father held only half open.
"You'll not like it," said the squire, still holding the door against
him, but speaking in a relenting tone. "The tobacco I use isn't what
young men like. Better go and have a cigar with Osborne."