quite familiar to me. Can I have seen him abroad? Or at some public school, perhaps?”
“No,” she resumed, quite interested, “he has never been abroad yet, and was educated here, at home. Tom, love, I am telling Mr. Harthouse that he never saw you abroad.”
“No such luck, sir,” said Tom.
There was little enough in him to brighten her face, for he was a sullen young fellow, and ungracious in his manner even to her. So much the greater must have been the solitude of her heart, and her need of some one on whom to bestow it. “So much the more is this whelp the only creature she has ever cared for,” thought Mr. James Harthouse, turning it over and over. “So much the more. So much the more.”
Both in his sister's presence, and after she had left the room, the whelp took no pains to hide his contempt for Mr. Bounderby, whenever he could indulge it without the observation of that independent man, by making wry faces, or shutting one eye. Without responding to these telegraphic communications, Mr. Harthouse encouraged him much in the course of the evening, and showed an unusual liking for him. At last, when he rose to return to his hotel, and was a little doubtful whether he knew the way by night, the whelp immediately proffered his services as guide, and turned out with him to escort him thither.
CHAPTER III
THE WHELP
IT was very remarkable that a young gentleman who had been brought up under one continuous system of unnatural restraint, should be a hypocrite; but it was certainly the case with Tom. It was very strange that a young gentleman who had never been left to his own guidance for five consecutive minutes, should be incapable at last of governing himself; but so it was with Tom. It was altogether unaccountable that a young gentleman whose imagination had been strangled in his cradle, should be still inconvenienced by its ghost in the form of grovelling sensualities; but such a monster, beyond all doubt, was Tom.
“Do you smoke?” asked Mr. James Harthouse, when they came to the hotel.
“I believe you!” said Tom.
He could do no less than ask Tom up; and Tom could do no less than go up. What with a cooling drink adapted to the weather, but not so weak as cool; and what with a rarer tobacco than was to be bought in those parts; Tom was soon in a highly free and easy state at his end of the sofa, and more than ever disposed to admire his new friend at the other end.
Tom blew his smoke aside, after he had been smoking a little while, and took an observation of his friend. “He don't seem to care about his dress,” thought Tom, “and yet how capitally he does it. What an easy swell he is!”
Mr. James Harthouse, happening to catch Tom's eye, remarked that he drank nothing, and filled his glass with his own negligent hand.
“Thank'ee,” said Tom. “Thank'ee. Well, Mr. Harthouse, I hope you have had about a dose of old Bounderby to-night.” Tom said this with one eye shut up again, and looking over his glass knowingly, at his entertainer.
“A very good fellow indeed!” returned Mr. James Harthouse.
“You think so, don't you?” said Tom. And shut up his eye again.
Mr. James Harthouse smiled; and rising from his end of the sofa, and lounging with his back against the chimney-piece, so that he stood before the empty fire-grate as he smoked, in front of Tom and looking down at him, observed:
“What a comical brother-in-law you are!”
“What a comical brother-in-law old Bounderby is, I think you mean,” said Tom.
“You are a piece of caustic, Tom,” retorted Mr. James Harthouse.
There was something so very agreeable in being so intimate with such a waistcoat; in being called Tom, in such an intimate way, by such a voice; in being on such off-hand terms so soon, with such a pair of whiskers; that Tom was uncommonly pleased with himself.
“Oh! I don't care for old Bounderby,” said he, “if you mean that. I have always called old Bounderby by the same name when I have talked about him, and I have always thought of him in the same way. I am not going to begin to be polite now, about old Bounderby. It would be rather late in the day.”
“Don't mind me,” returned James; “but take care when his wife is by, you know.”
“His wife?” said Tom. “My sister Loo? O yes!” And he laughed, and took a little more of the cooling drink.
James Harthouse continued to lounge in the same place and attitude, smoking his cigar in his own easy way, and looking pleasantly at the whelp, as if he knew himself to be a kind of agreeable demon who had only to hover over him, and he must give up his whole soul if required. It certainly did seem that the whelp yielded to this influence. He looked at his companion sneakingly, he looked at him admiringly, he looked at him boldly, and put up one leg on the sofa.
“My sister Loo?” said Tom. “She never cared for old Bounderby.”
“That's the past tense, Tom,” returned Mr. James Harthouse, striking the ash from his cigar with his little finger. “We are in the present tense, now.”
“Verb neuter, not to care. Indicative mood, present tense. First person singular, I do not care; second person singular, thou dost not care; third person singular, she does not care,” returned Tom.
“Good! Very quaint!” said his friend. “Though you don't mean it.”
“But I do mean it,” cried Tom. “Upon my honour! Why, you won't tell me, Mr. Harthouse, that you really suppose my sister Loo does care for old Bounderby.”
“My dear fellow,” returned the other, “what am I bound to suppose, when I find two married people living in harmony and happiness?”
Tom had by this time got both his legs on the sofa. If his second leg had not been already there when he was called a dear fellow, he would have put it up at that great stage of the conversation. Feeling it necessary to do something then, he stretched himself out at greater length, and, reclining with the back of his head on the end of the sofa, and smoking with an infinite assumption of negligence, turned his common face, and not too sober eyes, towards the face looking down upon him so carelessly yet so potently.
“You know our governor, Mr. Harthouse,” said Tom, “and therefore, you needn't be surprised that Loo married old Bounderby. She never had a lover, and the governor proposed old Bounderby, and she took him.”
“Very dutiful in your interesting sister,” said Mr. James Harthouse.
“Yes, but she wouldn't have been as dutiful, and it would not have come off as easily,” returned the whelp, “if it hadn't been for me.”
The tempter merely lifted his eyebrows; but the whelp was obliged to go on.
“I persuaded her,” he said, with an edifying air of superiority. “I was stuck into old Bounderby's bank (where I never wanted to be), and I knew I should get into scrapes there, if she put old Bounderby's pipe out; so I told her my wishes, and she came into them. She would do anything for me. It was very game of her, wasn't it?”
“It was charming, Tom!”
“Not that it was altogether so important to her as it was to me,” continued Tom coolly, “because my liberty and comfort, and perhaps my getting on, depended on it; and she had no other lover, and staying at home was like staying in jail—especially when I was gone. It wasn't as if she gave up another lover for old Bounderby; but still it was a good thing in her.”
“Perfectly delightful. And she gets on so placidly.”
“Oh,” returned Tom, with contemptuous patronage, “she's a regular girl. A girl can get on anywhere. She has settled down to the life, and she don't mind. It does just as well as another. Besides, though Loo is a girl, she's not a common sort of girl. She can shut herself up within herself, and think—as I have often known her sit and watch the fire—for an hour at a stretch.”
“Ay, ay? Has resources of her own,” said Harthouse, smoking quietly.
“Not so much of that as you may suppose,” returned Tom; “for our governor had her crammed with all sorts of dry bones and sawdust. It's his system.”
“Formed his daughter on his own model?” suggested Harthouse.
