The Railway Man and His ChildrenOliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
General
The Railway Man and His Children
Oliphant, Mrs. (Margaret)
Children of the rich -- Fiction; Families -- Fiction; Forgery -- Fiction; Scotland -- Fiction; Social classes -- Fiction
“Oh, you silly boy!--more for you in that way than for any living
creature. And very naturally, for are not you his heir--his
successor--to represent him in anything he does not do himself?”
“For pride, then,” said Archie, throwing down rather roughly upon the
rug one of the dogs with which he was playing, “not for anything else.”
“Oh, poor little doggie,” said Evelyn, seeing it inexpedient to continue
this subject, and then she added more lightly, “What are they to be
called then, Archie? Roy and Dhu?”
“Whatever you like,” cried the young man. “I care nothing for them now:
they are just little brutes that fawn on anybody. You may call them Red
and Black, if you like, like the cards. I don’t care if I never saw them
more.”
And he turned upon his heel and strode away. But these were words too
dignified and tragical to suit with Archie’s appearance, which was not
that of the hero of romance who grandly does those things. To turn on
your heel and stride away, you ought to be six feet at least, with chest
and shoulders to match. Archie was about five feet six, stooped, and was
badly dressed. He had not yielded to any soft compulsion on this point,
as Marion had done so easily. He had begun to perceive it himself, nay,
he could see that the youngest footman’s cut of livery suit was better
than his. But he clung to his old suit all the same.
The shooting which Mr. Rowland had taken along with Rosmore was not very
great--a few grouse on the hillside, a few partridges late in the
season, some pheasants as tame as poultry in those delightful woods
which were so pleasant to wander in (when your shoes were thick and you
did not mind the damp), but not sufficient to entertain many birds. I
don’t know how rich men generally who have made their money, and have
not been used to those luxuries, arrange about the shooting in the fine
“places” which they buy and retire to when their portion is
made--whether they fall naturally into the habit of it, and shoot like
the other gentlemen, or whether it is a matter that lies heavy on their
mind. It certainly lay very heavy on the mind of Archie, who was too shy
to acknowledge that he knew nothing about that mode of exercise, and
therefore went out with the keeper when the dreadful moment came in
great perturbation, not frightened, indeed, for his gun, or for shooting
himself, which would have been a certain deliverance, but for cutting a
ridiculous figure in the eyes of Roderick, the gamekeeper, who talked
to him, the inexperienced Glasgow boy, as he would have talked to any
young gentleman who had been accustomed to the moors from his cradle.
Archie did not reflect that Roderick knew perfectly where he had come
from and how he had been bred, and that this assumption that he knew all
about it was indeed pure ridicule on the keeper’s part, which would have
been completely divested of its sting if the lad had possessed
sufficient courage to say that he was a novice. But he did not, and the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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