“I think you presume a little too much on our long friendship,” said Arthur, seizing his hat. “Good night; there has been enough of this. Things will be bad indeed with me, I promise you, if, after this speech of yours, I ever come to you again.”
He rushed out of the room before the other could reply. Durant went to the window and looked after him with a wistful subdued light of pity and tenderness in his face.
“I wonder how long it will be first?” he said to himself.
Lewis Durant was the _ami de l’enfance_ of Arthur Curtis. He had always been a little bigger, a little stronger, a little steadier, as he was a little older than his friend. He was not a young man of family like Arthur; and Lady Curtis, who was philosophical in her tendencies, had pointed many a social criticism by the fact, laughingly commented upon, that her son’s fagmaster at Eton, and Mentor in life, was the grandson of the great saddler with whom Sir John and his predecessors had dealt for ages. The Durants, who were French by origin, had made a great deal of money in that business, and one of the sons had been made a clergyman. This was the father of Lewis, who had been brought up accordingly in as much luxury as his friend; but unfortunate speculations on his father’s part had changed all that by this time, and the young man was now fighting his way at the Bar, with very little to keep up the warfare on, and none of those supports of good connection which help the aristocratic poor to keep their heads above water. He had a home in the depths of one of the Midland counties, where the Rector--once able to hold his own with the best of his country neighbours, and considered a very good sort of man--had fallen to the ordinary parsonic level, without any standing ground beyond it, and not much right to high consideration on that ground. For the Rev. Mr. Durant was not a very good clergyman. It had not been the object of his life to become so; but rather to obliterate from all minds by his luxurious living, his carriages, his conservatories, his expenditure in every way, that he was the son of the well-known saddler; as it has been that saddler’s object to advance his son in life and make him a member of the upper class by making him a clergyman. Everybody was quite conscious of this while he was rich; but, naturally, everybody became still more conscious of it when he became poor; and as his wealth had been his chief standing ground, and he had not much worth or goodness, and no activity, to gain him credit in his parish, the downfall was pretty nearly complete. And the woman whom he had married had been no more than a fit partner for such a man; so that when Lewis, their only child, became old enough to think of home as anything more than a jolly place to spend holidays in, the boy’s refined and delicate mind had suffered a severe shock. How it was that he happened to possess a refined and delicate mind is a totally different question, and one into which we need not inquire; but the effect upon him of the ostentatious, showy, lavish, and lazy wealth in the first instance, and of the useless, slovenly, languid poverty which followed, was remarkable enough. A great many things go by contraries in this perverse world, and nothing more commonly than the habits of parents and children. In Scotland, it has passed into a proverb that an active mother has an indolent daughter. The insinuating and bland courtier has to struggle against the abruptness or loutishness of his son, and even virtue has very often moral weakness, if not worse, for its next descendant. In Lewis Durant’s case the contradiction was a happy one. Disgusted by the aimless leisure and nothingness of the paternal life, the young man flung himself into work with a zeal and passion seldom to be found. He had no family friends in the class he had been brought up in, and his personal friends were of his own standing, themselves too young and inexperienced to help others; but he had not cared for this; he had flung himself into the work of his profession--the Bar--for which he had been trained as his father had been trained for the Church, as the profession of a gentleman, a trade not incompatible with the possession of a great deal of money, and not requiring to be kept up by the happy man who was not obliged to work for his bread. Perhaps the energy of the old saddler had got into the veins of Lewis, transmuted into some kind of potable gold, some elixir of force and life. If so, it had clearly “suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange,” for there was no greed of gold, no thirst for wealth in the young man’s mind.