"Er--no. Not exactly that. Hang it, Glanton, don't I put things plain
enough? I mean I was first in the field, and it isn't fair--in fact I
consider it beastly dishonourable for you, or any other fellow, to come
trying to upset my coach. Now--do you see?"
"I think I understand," I said, feeling softened towards him. "But as
regards myself, first of all you had better be sure you are not assuming
too much, in the next place, you are just in the position of anybody
else, and can't set up any such plea as prior rights. See?"
"No, I'll be hanged if I do," he snarled. "I've told you how things
stand, so now you're warned."
"I'm not going to quarrel with you," I answered. "We are all alone
here, with no chance of anybody overhearing us or at any rate
understanding us if they did. Yet I prefer talking `dark' as the Zulus
say. Let's start fair, d'you hear? Let's start fair--and--now you're
warned."
He scowled and made no answer. In fact, he sulked for the rest of the
evening--and, to anticipate--long after that.
I went outside before turning in, leaving Falkner in the sulks. The
rain had ceased, and bright patches of stars were shining between the
parting clouds. The fire had died low, and the conversation of the boys
had dropped too. I can always think best out in the open, and now I set
myself hard to think over these last developments. By its date the
letter must have been nearly a week on the road. Well, there was not
time for much to have happened in between. Then what Falkner had just
revealed had come to me as something of an eye-opener. I had at first
rather suspected him of resenting me as an interloper, but subsequently
as I noted the free and easy terms on which he stood with both his
cousins--the one equally with the other--the last thing to enter my mind
was that he should think seriously of either of them, and that one Aida.
Why, she used to keep him in order and treat him very much as a boy--
indeed all her references to him when discussing him with me, even as
lately as in the letter I had just received, bore the same elder
sisterly tone, and I felt sure that while this held good, Falkner, in
entertaining the hopes he had revealed to me, was simply twisting for
himself a rope of sand. At the same time I felt sorry for him, and my
not unnatural resentment of the very dictatorial tone which he had
chosen to adopt towards myself cooled entirely. He was young and so
boyish that every allowance must be made. At the same time I envied him
his youth. As for me, well I hardly knew, but as my meditations ran on
in the stillness and silence of the starlit night, clustering ever
around one recollection, well I realised, and not for the first time,
that life seemed very much to have been wasted in my case.
The one talent man in the parable recurred to my mind, and I will even
own, I hope not irreverently, to a sneaking sympathy for that same poor
devil. He might have lost his one talent, or fooled it away, instead of
which, he at any rate kept it--and, after all there is a saying that it
is more difficult to keep money than to make it. Now it seemed to me
that I was very much in the same boat with him. I had kept my talent--
so far--and was it even now too late to add to it, but--what the deuce
had this got to do with Aida Sewin, who formed the undercurrent of all
the riotous meditations in which I was indulging? Well perhaps it had
something.