The Good Comrade | Page 4

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 had not taken him away, but it had reduced him; he gave little trouble now even when Johnny Gillat came; he kept so out of the way that she had almost come to regard him as a negligible factor--which was a mistake.
Both the Captain and his friend had a great respect for Mrs. Polkington, though both felt at times that she treated them a little hardly. The Captain especially felt this, but he put up with it; after all it is easier to acquiesce than to assert one's rights, and, as Johnny pointed out, it was on the whole more comfortable, in spite of horse-hair chairs,