After breakfast he started upon his errand with a very heavy heart. He loved his friend dearly. Between these two there had grown up now during a period of many years, that undemonstrative, unexpressed, almost unconscious affection which, with men, will often make the greatest charm of their lives, but which is held by women to be quite unsatisfactory and almost nugatory. It may be doubted whether either of them had ever told the other of his regard. “Yours always,” in writing, was the warmest term that was ever used. Neither ever dreamed of suggesting that the absence of the other would be a cause of grief or even of discomfort. They would bicker with each other, and not unfrequently abuse each other. Chance threw them much together, but they never did anything to assist chance. Women, who love each other as well, will always be expressing their love, always making plans to be together, always doing little things each for the gratification of the other, constantly making presents backwards and forwards. These two men had never given anything, one to the other, beyond a worn-out walking-stick, or a cigar. They were rough to each other, caustic, and almost ill-mannered. But they thoroughly trusted each other; and the happiness, prosperity, and, above all, the honour of the one were, to the other, matters of keenest moment. The bigger man of the two, the one who felt rather than knew himself to be the bigger, had to say that which would go nigh to break his friend’s heart, and the task which he had in hand made him sick at his own heart. He walked slowly across the fields, turning over in his own mind the words he would use. His misery for his friend was infinitely greater than any that he had suffered on his own account, either in regard to Mr. Puddleham’s chapel or the calumny of the Marquis.
He found Gilmore sauntering about the stable yard. “Old fellow,” he said, “come along, I have got something to say to you.”
“It is about Mary, I suppose?”
“Well, yes; it is about Mary. You mustn’t be a woman, Harry, or let a woman make you seriously wretched.”
“I know it all. That will do. You need not say anything more.” Then he put his hands into the pockets of his shooting coat, and walked off as though all had been said that was necessary. Fenwick had told his message and might now go away. As for himself, in the sharpness of his agony he had as yet made no scheme for a future purpose. Only this he had determined. He would see that false woman once again, and tell her what he thought of her conduct.
But Fenwick knew that his task was not yet done. Gilmore might walk off, but he was bound to follow the unhappy man.
“Harry,” he said, “you had better let me come with you for awhile. You had better hear what I have to say.”
“I want to hear nothing more. What good can it be? Like a fool, I had set my fortune on one cast of the die, and I have lost it. Why she should have added on the misery and disgrace of the last few weeks to the rest, I cannot imagine. I suppose it has been her way of punishing me for my persistency.”
“It has not been that, Harry.”
“God knows what it has been. I do not understand it.” He had turned from the stables towards the house, and had now come to a part of the grounds in which workmen were converting a little paddock in front of the house into a garden. The gardener was there with four or five labourers, and planks, and barrows, and mattocks, and heaps of undistributed earth and gravel were spread about. “Give over with this,” he said to the gardener, angrily. The man touched his hat, and stood amazed. “Leave it, I say, and send these men away. Pay them for the work, and let them go.”
“You don’t mean as we are to leave it all like this, sir?”
“I do mean that you are to leave it just as it is.” There was a man standing with a shovel in his hand levelling some loose earth, and the Squire, going up to him, took the shovel from him and threw it upon the ground. “When I say a thing, I mean it. Ambrose, take these men away. I will not have another stroke of work done here.” The Vicar came up to him and whispered into his ear a prayer that he would not expose himself before the men; but the Squire cared nothing for his friend’s whisper. He shook off the Vicar’s hand from his arm and stalked away into the house.
Two rooms, the two drawing-rooms as they were called, on the ground floor had been stripped of the old paper, and were now in that state of apparent ruin which always comes upon such rooms when workmen enter them with their tools. There were tressels with a board across them, on which a man was standing at this moment, whose business it was to decorate the ceiling.
“That will do,” said the Squire. “You may get down, and leave the place.” The man stood still on his board with his eyes open and his brush in his hand. “I have changed my mind, and you may come down,” said Mr. Gilmore. “Tell Mr. Cross to send me his bill for what he has done, and it shall be paid. Come down, when I tell you. I will have nothing
