The Good Comrade | Page 4

Mr. Gillat looked at her uneasily; every now and then there flitted
through his mind a suspicion that Julia was clever too, as clever
perhaps as her mother, and though not, like her, a moral and social
pillar standing in the high first estate from which he and the Captain
had fallen. Julia had never been that, never aspired to it; she was no
success at all; content to come and sit in the dining-room with him and
Bouquet; she could not really be clever, or else she would have
achieved something for herself, and scorned to consort with failures.
He smiled benignly as he remembered this, observing, "I dare say
something will be done--I hope it may; your mother's a wonderful
woman, a wonderful--"
He broke off to listen; Julia listened too, then she rose to her feet.
"That's father," she said, and went to let him in.
Mr. Gillat followed her to the door. "Ah--h'm," he said, as he saw the
Captain coming in slowly, with a face of despairing melancholy and a
drooping step.
"Come down-stairs, father," Julia said. "Come along, Johnny."
They followed her meekly to the basement, where there was a gloomy
little room behind the kitchen reserved for the Captain's special use. A
paraffin stove stood in the fire-place also, own brother to the one in the
dining-room; Julia stooped to light it, while her father sank into a chair.
"Gillat," he said in a voice of hopelessness, "I am a ruined man."

"No?" Mr. Gillat answered sympathetically, but without surprise. "Dear
me!" He carefully put down the hat and stick he had brought with him,
the one on the edge of the table, the other against it, both so badly
balanced that they fell to the ground.
"You shouldn't do it, you know," he said, with mild reproof; "you really
shouldn't."
"Do it!" the Captain cried. "Do what?"
Julia looked up from the floor where she knelt trimming the stove-lamp.
"Have five whiskeys and sodas," she said, examining her father
judicially.
He did not deny the charge; Julia's observation was not to be avoided.
"And what is five?" he demanded with dignity.
"Three too many for you," she answered.
"Do you mean to insinuate that I am intoxicated?" he asked. "Johnny,"
he turned pathetically to his friend, "my own daughter insinuates that I
am intoxicated."
"No," Julia said, "I don't; I say it does not agree with you, and it
doesn't--you know you ought not to take more than two glasses."
"Is that your opinion, Gillat?" Captain Polkington asked. "Is that what
you meant? That I--I should confine myself to two glasses of whiskey
and water?"
"I wasn't thinking of the whiskey," Johnny said apologetically; "it was
the gees."
The Captain groaned, but what he said more Julia did not hear; she
went out into the kitchen to get paraffin. But she had no doubt that he
defended the attacked point to his own satisfaction, as he always had
done--cards, races, and kindred pleasant, if expensive, things, ever
since the days long ago before he sent in his papers.

These same pleasant things had had a good deal to do with the sending
in of the papers; not that they had led the Captain into anything
disgraceful, the compulsion to resign his commission came solely from
relatives, principally those of his wife. It was their opinion that he
worked too little and played too much, and an expensive kind of play.
That he drank too much was not said; of course, the Indian climate and
life tempted to whiskey pegs, and nature had not fitted him for them in
large quantities; still that was never cast up against him. Enough was,
however, to bring things to an end; he resigned, relations helped to pay
his debts, and he came home with the avowed intention of getting some
gentlemanly employment. Of course he never got any, it wasn't likely,
hardly possible; but he had something left to live upon--a very small
private income, a clever wife, and some useful and conscientious
relations.
Somehow the family lived, quite how in the early days no one knew;
Mrs. Polkington never spoke of it at the time, and now, mercifully, she
had forgotten part, but the struggle must have been bitter. Herself
disillusioned, her daughters mere children, her position insecure, and
her husband not yet reduced to submission, and always prone to slip
back into his old ways. But she had won through somehow, and time
had given her the compensations possible to her nature. She was, by her
own untiring efforts, a social factor now, even a social success; her
eldest daughter was engaged to a clergyman of sufficient, if small,
means, and her youngest was almost a beauty. As to the Captain, he
was still there; time