Mortomley was an experimenter. When ruin has marked a family for her own, she usually endows the last of the race with some such form of genius, which clings about and lends a certain picturesque grace to his decay, as ivy climbing around an almost lifeless tree clothes it with a freshness and a beauty it lacked in the days of its strength.
And the form of genius of the first Mortomley who engaged in trade had, with every condition of existence altered, reappeared in this later, weaker, and more sensitive descendant.
Even in his father's time he had introduced processes and combinations into their laboratory hitherto unthought of; and since he had been sole master of the business, strange and unwonted colours had appeared in the market which caused astonishment, not unmixed with dread, to fill the hearts of those who had hitherto been content to travel in the footsteps of their predecessors, but who now confessed they must move quicker or they would be left far in the rear.
Of all these things Mrs. Trebasson encouraged Mr. Mortomley to speak as she would have encouraged any former Mortomley to talk of his hunters, his hounds, his library, or anything else in which he took delight; and Mortomley, flattered and pleased, talked of his plans and hopes with the simplicity of a boy, and further, as the intimacy grew closer, told the old lady about his lonely home, his lack of all near relatives, the love he had borne for his mother, and the tender respect, the unquestioning admiration, the devoted affection he had felt for his father--a Mortomley every inch--though a Mortomley of The Place no more.
And Miss Trebasson, in her plain nun-like dress, her beauty unheightened by decking or jewel, sat by and listened; and Mortomley never knew he had spoken to such purpose of himself and his surroundings, that the daughter had given him her heart and the mother was willing to give him her daughter before his holiday came to an end. But it was not to be. Had that ever been, this story must have remained unwritten. With Leonora Trebasson for his wife, it is quite certain Mortomley never would, whether ill or well, successful or defeated, have been permitted to make the awful _fiasco_ of delivering himself, hair-shorn, strength gone, into the hands of the Philistines. There are wives and wives; and Mortomley, people said, was not fortunate in the choice of his. Spite of her almost judicial wisdom, other people thought Miss Trebasson had not been fortunate in the choice of her dearest friend. Perhaps for a time she thought so herself, when she found that friend had bound Mortomley to her chariot wheels. Perhaps for one night her heart did feel very bitter towards her inseparable companion; but if this were so, she was too essentially just to allow her disappointment to overpower her reason. If her eyes had been unclouded by prejudice, she would have understood long before, that although Dolly Gerace was not apparently possessed of a single quality likely to win a man like Mortomley, yet in reality she was precisely the sort of girl a keen observer would have prophesied certain to attract him.