The Good Comrade. Una L. Silberrad
bachelor friend of her husband. He was still a bachelor, and still her husband's friend, but the wealth had gone long ago. He had now only just enough to keep him, fortunately so secured that he could not touch the principal. It was a mercy he had it, for there was no known work at which he could have earned sixpence, unless perhaps it was road scraping under a not too exacting District Council. He was a harmless enough person, but when he took it into his head to leave his lodgings in town for others, equally cheap and nasty, at Marbridge, Mrs. Polkington felt fate was hard upon her. It was like having two Captain Polkingtons, of a different sort, but equally unsuitable for public use, in the place. In self defence she had been obliged to make definite rules for Mr. Gillat's coming and going about the house, and still more definite rules as to the rooms in which he might be found. The dining-room was allowed him, and there he was when Julia came.
He looked up as she entered, and smiled; he regarded her as almost as much his friend as her father; a composite creature, and a necessary connection between the superior and inferior halves of the household.
"Father not in, I hear," he said.
"No," Julia answered. "What a smell there is!"
Mr. Gillat allowed it. "There's something gone wrong with Bouquet," he said, thoughtfully regarding the stove.
The "Bouquet Heater" was the name under which it was patented; it did not seem quite honest to speak of it as a heater, so perhaps "Bouquet" was the better name.
Julia went to it. "I should think there is," she said, and turned it up, and turn it down, and altered the wicks, until she had improved matters a little.
"I'm afraid your father's having larks," Johnny said, watching her.
"It's rather a pity if he is," Julia answered; "he has got to see some one on business to-morrow."
"Who?"
"Mr. Frazer, a clergyman who wants to marry Violet."
Mr. Gillat sat upright. "Dear, dear!" he exclaimed. "No? Really?" and when Julia had given him an outline of the circumstances, he added softly, "A wonderful woman! I always had a great respect for your mother." From which it is clear he thought Mrs. Polkington was to be congratulated. "And when is it to be?" he asked.
"Violet says a year's time; they could not afford to marry sooner and do it properly, but it will have to be sooner all the same."
"A year is not a very long time," Mr. Gillat observed; "they go fast, years; one almost loses count of them, they go so fast."
"I dare say," Julia answered, "but Violet will have to get married without waiting for the year to pass. We can't afford a long engagement."
Mr. Gillat looked mildly surprised and troubled; he always did when scarcity of money was brought home to him, but Julia regarded it quite calmly.
"The sooner Violet is married," she said, "the sooner we can reduce some of the expenses; we are living beyond our income now—not a great deal, perhaps, still a bit; Violet's going would save enough, I believe; we could catch up then. That is one reason, but the chief is that a long engagement is expensive; you see, we should have to have meals different, and fires different, and all manner of extras if Mr. Frazer came in and out constantly. We should have to live altogether in a more expensive style; we might manage it for three months, or six if we were driven to it, but for a year—it is out of the question."
"But," Mr. Gillat protested, "if they can't afford it? You said he could not; he is a curate."
"He must get a living, or a chaplaincy, or something; or rather, I expect we must get it for him. Oh, no, we have no Church influence, and we don't know any bishops; but one can always rake up influence, and get to know people, if one is not too particular how."
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