Her father, Capt. Geoffry Cavendish, seemed to regard my devotion to
his daughter with a certain amusement and good-will; indeed, I used
to fancy that he had a liking for me, and would go out of his way to
say a pleasant word, but once it happened that I took his kindness
in ill part, and still consider that I was justified in so doing.
A gentleman should not have pity thrust upon him unless he himself,
by his complaints, seems to sue for it, and that was ever far from
me, and I was already, although so young, as sensitive to all
slights upon my dignity as any full-grown man. So when, one day,
lying at full length upon the grass under a reddening oak with a
book under my eyes and my pocket full of nuts if, perchance, my
little sweetheart should come that way with her black nurse, I heard
suddenly Captain Cavendish's voice ring out loud and clear, as it
always did, from his practice on the quarter-deck, with something
like an oath as of righteous indignation to the effect that it was a
damned shame for the heir and the eldest son, and a lad with a head
of a scholar and the arm of a soldier, to be thrust aside so and
made so little of. Then another voice, smoothly sliding, as if to
make no friction with the other's opinions, asked of whom he spoke,
and that smoothly sliding voice I recognised as Mr. Abbot's, the
attorney's, and Captain Cavendish replied in a fashion which
astonished me, for I had no idea to whom he had referred--"Harry
Maria Wingfield, the eldest son and heir of as fine and gallant a
gentleman as ever trod English soil, who is treated like the son of
a scullion by those who owe him most, and 'tis a damned shame and I
care not who hears me."
Then, before I had as yet fairly my wits about me, Mr. Abbot spoke
again in that voice of his which I so hated in my boyish
downrightness and scorn of all policy that it may have led me to an
unjust estimate of all men of his profession. "But Col. John
Chelmsford hath no meaning to deal otherwise than fairly by the boy,
and neither, unless I greatly mistake, hath his wife." And this he
said as if both Colonel Chelmsford and my mother were at his elbow,
and for that manner of speaking I have ever had contempt, preferring
downright scurrility, and Captain Cavendish replied with his quick
agility of wrath, as precipitate toward judgment as a sailor to the
masthead in a storm: "And what if she be? The more shame to them that they have not
enough wit to see what they do! I tell thee this poor Harry hath a
harder time of it than any slave on my plantation in Virginia,
I--"