Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 2.djvu/53

 attend to his farm. He threw it up, invested the proceeds as a capital, and lived on the interest as a gentleman at large. He travelled over Europe for some time--chiefly on foot--came back, having recovered his spirits--resumed his old desultory purposeless life at different country-houses, and at one of those houses I and Charles Haughton met him. Here I pause, to state that Willy Losely at that time impressed me with the idea that he was a thoroughly honest man. Though he was certainly no formalist--though he had lived with wild sets of convivial scapegraces--though, out of sheer high spirits, he would now and then make conventional Proprieties laugh at their own long faces; yet, I should have said that Bayard himself--and Bayard was no saint--could not have been more incapable of a disloyal, rascally, shabby action. Nay, in the plain matter of integrity, his ideas might be called refined, almost Quixotic. If asked to give or to lend, Willy's hand was in his pocket in an instant; but though thrown among rich men--careless as himself--Willy never put his hand into their pockets, never borrowed, never owed. He would accept hospitality--make frank use of your table, your horses, your dogs--but your money, no! He repaid all he took from a host by rendering himself the pleasantest guest that host ever entertained. Poor Willy! I think I see his quaint smile brimming over with sly sport! The sound of his voice was like a cry of 'o-half-holiday' in a schoolroom. He dishonest! I should as soon have suspected the noonday sun of being a dark lantern! I remember, when he and I were walking home from wild-duck shooting in advance of our companions, a short conversation between us that touched me greatly, for it showed that, under all his levity, there were sound sense and right feeling. I asked him about his son, then a boy at school: 'Why, as it was the Christmas vacation, he had refused our host's suggestion to let the lad come down there?' 'Ah,' said he, 'don't fancy that I will lead my son to grow up a scatterbrained good-for-nought like his father. His society is the joy of my life; whenever I have enough in my pockets to afford myself that joy, I go and hire a quiet lodging close by his school, to have him with me from Saturday till Monday all to myself--where he never hears wild fellows call me "Willy," and ask me to mimic. I had hoped to have spent this vacation with him in that way, but his