The Camera Fiend. E. W. Hornung
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no fool,” remarked Lettice Upton, irrelevantly enough.
“You know what I mean,” snapped her brother Horace. “He's being absolutely spoilt, and you're at the bottom of it.”
“I didn't give him asthma!”
“Don't be childish, Letty.”
“But that's what's spoiling his life.”
“I wasn't talking about his life. I don't believe it, either.”
“You think he enjoys his bad nights?”
“I think he scores by them. He'd tell you himself that he never even thinks of getting up to first school now.”
“Would you if you'd been sitting up half the night with asthma?”
“Perhaps not; but I don't believe that happens so often as you think.”
“It happens often enough to justify him in making one good night pay for two or three bad ones.”
“I don't call that playing the game. I call it shamming.”
“Well, if it is, he makes up for it. They were doing Ancient Greek Geography in his form at early school last term. Tony tackled it in his spare time, and got most marks in the exam.”
“Beastly young swot!” quoth his elder [pg 35] brother. “I'm glad he didn't buck to me about that.”
“I don't think there's much danger of his bucking to you,” said Lettice, smiling in the red light. She did not add as her obvious reason that Horace, like many another athletic young man, was quite incapable of sympathising with the non-athletic type. But he guessed that she meant something of the sort, and having sensibilities of his own, and a good heart somewhere in his mesh of muscles, he felt hurt. “I looked after him all right,” said Horace, “the one term we were there together. So did Fred for the next year. But it's rather rough on Fred and myself, who were both something in the school at his age, to hear and see for ourselves that Tony's nobody even in the house!”
Lettice slipped a sly hand under the great biceps of her eldest brother.
“But don't you see, old boy, that it makes it the worse for Tony that you and Fred were what you were at school? They measure him by the standard you two set up; it's natural enough, but it isn't fair.”
“He needn't be a flyer at games,” said Horace, duly softened by a little flattery. “But he might be a tryer!”
“Wait till we get a little more breath into his body.”
[pg 36]
“A bag of oxygen wouldn't make him a cricketer.”
“Yet he's so keen on cricket!”
“I wish he wasn't so keen; he thinks and talks more about it than Fred or I did when we were in the eleven, yet he never looked like making a player.”
“I should say he thinks and talks more about most things; it's his nature, just as it's Fred's and yours to be men of action.”
“Well, I'm glad he's not allowed to cumber the crease this season,” said Horace, bowling his cigarette-end into the darkness with a distinct swerve in the air. “To have him called our ‘pocket edition,’ on the cricket-field of all places, is a bit too thick.”
Lettice withdrew her sympathetic hand.
“He's as good a sportsman as either of you, at heart,” she said warmly. “And I hope he may make you see it before this doctor's done with him!”
“This doctor!” jeered Horace, quick to echo her change of tone as well. “You mean the fool who wanted to send that kid round the world on his own?”
“He's no fool, Horace, and you know nothing whatever about him.”
“No; but I know something about our Tony! If he took the least care of himself at home, there [pg 37] might be something to be said for letting him go; but he's the most casual young hound I ever struck.”
“I know he's casual.”
Lettice made the admission with reluctance; next moment she was sorry her sense of fairness had so misled her.
“Besides,” said Horace, “he wouldn't be cured if he could. Think what he'd miss!”
“Oh, if you're coming back to that, there's no more to be said.”
And the girl halted at the lighted windows.
“But I do come back to it. Isn't he up in town at this moment under this very doctor of yours?”
“He's not my doctor.”
“But you first heard about him; you're the innovator of the family, Letty, so it's no use trying to score off me. Isn't Tony up in London to-night?”
“I believe he is.”
“Then I'll tell you what he's doing at this moment,” cried Horace, with egregious confidence, as he held his watch to the windows. “It's after eleven; he's in the act of struggling out of some theatre, where the atmosphere's so good for asthma!” Lettice left the gibe unanswered. It was founded on recent fact which she had been the first to deplore when Tony made no secret of it in the holidays; indeed, she was by no means blind to his many and obvious failings; but they interested [pg 38] her more than the equally obvious virtues of her other brothers, whose unmeasured objurgations drove her to the opposite extreme in special pleading. She tried to believe that there was more in her younger brother than in any of them, and would often speak up for him as though she had succeeded. It may have been merely a woman's weakness for the weak, but Lettice had taught herself to believe in Tony. And perhaps of all his people she was the only one who could have followed his vagaries of that night without thinking the worse of him.
But she had no more to say to Horace about the matter, and would have gone indoors without another word if Mr. Upton had not come out hastily at that moment. He had been looking for her everywhere, he declared with some asperity. Her mother could not sleep, and wished to see her; otherwise it was time they were all in bed, and what there was to talk about till all hours was more than he could fathom. So he saw the pair before him through the lighted rooms, a heavy man with a flaming neck and a smouldering eye. Horace would be heavy, too, when his bowling days were over. The girl was on finer lines; but she looked like a woman at her worst; tired, exasperated, and clearly older than her brother, but of other clay.
That young man smoked a last cigarette in his [pg 39] father's library, and unhesitatingly admitted the subject of dissension and dissent upon the terrace.
“I said he wasn't doing much good there,” he added, “and I don't think he is. Letty stood up for him, as she always does.”
“Do you mean that he's doing any harm?” asked Mr. Upton plainly.
“Not for a moment. I never said there was any harm in Tony. I—I sometimes wish there was more!”
“More manhood, I suppose you'd call it?”
Mr. Upton spoke with a disconcerting grimness.
“More go about him,” said Horace. He could not say as much to his father as he had to Letty. That was evident. But he was not the boy to bolt from his guns.
“Yet you know how much he has to take all that out of him?” continued Mr. Upton, with severity.
“I know,” said Horace hastily, “and of course that's really why he's doing no good; but I must say that doctor of his doesn't seem to be doing him any either.”
Mr. Upton got excitedly to his feet, and Horace made up his mind to the downright snub that he deserved. But by a lucky accident Horace had turned the wrath that had been gathering against himself into quite another quarter.
[pg 40]
“I agree with you