He was connected with a firm of high repute in Parliament Street: Bracknell and Street. Oswald Cray was a partner, but his name did not appear as yet: and, as you may readily imagine, the lion's share of the profits did not fall to him. In fact, he had entered it very much as his half-brother had entered the house of Dr. Davenal--to obtain a footing. For more substantial recompense he was content to wait. Bracknell and Street were engineers to the Hallingham line, and to Oswald Cray had been entrusted its working and management.
He had said to Lady Oswald, in answer to her reproach of his not calling to see her more frequently, that his time when at Hallingham was much occupied. True, so far: but the chief and real motive which kept him from her house was a sort of sensitive feeling relating to her money. It was not that he dreaded people's saying he was looking after it: he would have scorned that kind of reproach: but he did dread lest any degree of intimacy, any pushing of himself in her way, should cause her to leave it to him. I am not sure that you will quite understand this; understand him or his feeling. None but a man of the nicest honour, who was entrenched, as it were, in his own pride, the pride of rectitude, could have felt this delicacy. He did not want Lady Oswald's money; he knew that he had no claim upon any of it, no right to it, and he would not put himself in her way more than he could help, even as a passing visitor. Gossiping Hallingham had said: "My lady would be leaving her nest-egg to Mr. Oswald Cray." The gossip had penetrated to Mr. Oswald Cray's ears, and his only notice of it was a haughty gesture of contempt: but in all probability it tended to increase his dislike to go to Lady Oswald's. During these business visits at Hallingham, he sojourned at a respectable inn of the old school, a little beyond the town and the Abbey Gardens, called the "Apple Tree," and had recently become more intimate with the family of Dr. Davenal.
Driven forth all his life from his father's home, allowed to enter it but at rare intervals, and then as a formally-invited guest, it cannot be supposed that Oswald Cray entertained any strong affection for his half-brother and sisters. Such a state of things would have been unnatural, quite in opposition to ordinary probabilities. It would be wrong to say that they disliked each other; but there was certainly no love: civil indifference may best express the feeling. Marcus, the eldest child of the second Mrs. Cray, was from three to four years younger than Oswald. It had been better that Mrs. Cray had fostered an affection between these boys, but she did just the reverse. She resented the contempt cast on her husband by the Oswalds of Thorndyke; she resented, most unreasonably, the fact that the little money of the first Mrs. Cray should have descended at once to Oswald; she even resented the child's having taken the distinguishing name: he was Oswald Cray, her son, plain Cray. How worse than foolish this was of her, how wrong, perhaps the woman might yet learn: but altogether it did excite her against Oswald; and she had kept him aloof from her own children, and encouraged those children to be jealous of him. When the boys became men, they met often, and were cordial enough with each other; but there was no feeling of brotherhood, there never could be any.