umour to show his great
spirit, and from her and from Captain William in turn I was condemned to
hear how he had said this and that of the doctor, which in my opinion
might have been more concise. 'Really, deuced good indeed!' Captain
William would exclaim. 'Don't you see it, Harry, my boy? He denies the
doctor has a right to cast him out of the world on account of his having
been the official to introduce him, and he'll only consent to be visited
when he happens to be as incapable of resisting as upon their very first
encounter.'

The doctor and death and marriage, I ventured to remind the captain, had
been riddled in this fashion by the whole army of humourists and their
echoes.

He and Julia fancied me cold to my father's merits. Fond as they were of
the squire, they declared war against him in private, they criticized
Janet, they thought my aunt Dorothy slightly wrong in making a secret of
her good deed: my father was the victim. Their unabated warmth consoled
me in the bitterest of seasons. He found a home with them at a time when
there would have been a battle at every step. The world soon knew that my
grandfather had cast me off, and with this foundation destroyed, the
entire fabric of the Grand Parade fell to the ground at once. The crash
was heavy. Jorian DeWitt said truly that what a man hates in adversity is
to see 'faces'; meaning that the humanity has gone out of them in their
curious observation of you under misfortune. You see neither friends nor
enemies. You are too sensitive for friends, and are blunted against
enemies. You see but the mask of faces: my father was sheltered from
that. Julia consulted his wishes in everything; she set traps to catch
his whims, and treated them as birds of paradise; she could submit to
have the toppling crumpled figure of a man, Bagenhope, his pensioner and
singular comforter, in her house. The little creature was fetched out of
his haunts in London purposely to soothe my father with performances on
his ancient clarionet, a most querulous plaintive instrument in his
discoursing, almost the length of himself; and she endured the nightly
sound of it in the guest's blue bedroom, heroically patient, a model to
me. Bagenhope drank drams: she allowanced him. He had known my father's
mother, and could talk of her in his cups: his playing, and his aged
tunes, my father said, were a certification to him that he was at the
bottom of the ladder. Why that should afford him peculiar