The Argosy — page 294: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Fack Laybourne’s Inheritance. 275 affection had grown up between them. Loyalty and honour might have been eventually triumphant over passion had not the secret of the lovers been betrayed to Edward by an anonymous letter, informing him of the one clandestine meeting which they had allowed themselves. A scene of the most violent description was the result ; and Edward so overwhelmed the offenders with insult and abuse as to render futile the subsequent attempts of friends to bring about a reconciliation. Charles, deprived henceforth of all pecuniary assistance from his brother, married Alice, and exchanged into a regiment under orders for the West Indies. Here his young wife succumbed in a very short time to the climate, and he, after three years or so of lonely misery, married the widow of a brother-officer, with a tiny daughter and the modicum of an income. And five years before my meeting with his daughter Rita he had died—poor to the last and the victim of a lingering disease. Edward had also married. His angry vanity was soothed, at the time of Alice’s desertion, by the astute attentions of a lady, no longer young, and allied to the noble family from which the bride-elect sprang. The marriage was not happy, and Edward, disappointed and embittered, conceived a vehement hatred against the ‘‘ parnpered aristocrats’? whom he considered incapable of appreciating him. On the death of his wife he severed himself completely from her kindred, and jealously debarred them from all intercourse with his boy. He became a violent Radical, and lost no opportunity of defending every incendiary social theory of which the application could not interfere with his personal well-being. His great subject was the selfishness of family claims. ‘Thunders of applause greeted him at working- men’s meetings, when he announced that he could easily conceive himself ‘‘ disinheriting the mere individual, his son, in the interest of the glorious entity—Humanity.” We were the Laybournes’ nearest neighbours,: and during his mother’s lifetime we had always seen a great deal of Jack. Asa curly-headed little boy, in the days when Kate and I were stil] in the school-room, he was the constant playfellow of certain infant nephews and nieces of ours. Jack was a stalwart young officer, still in the first pride of his epaulets, and one of these same nieces, Lily, was a pretty, delicate girl of eighteen when the old playfellows met once more, and, unfortunately—fell in love! The situation would perhaps be more accurately described by saying that Lily fell in love with Jack, and the young man, shy and secretly ardent, gave himself up very willingly to be worshipped. He had been starved of affection all his life, poor fellow! for his mother had cared little for anybody but herself, and his father, uneasily conscious, I suppose, of a certain superiority of nature in the lad, carped at him perpetually as a “fine gentleman.” It may easily be imagined what was Edward Laybourne’s rage on hearing that his son had engaged himself to the penniless scion of an aristocratic stock. He raved like a madman—with the eonichooks.c@ An