The Fall of Doctor Onslow by Frances Vernon

‘Then if I’m to be in time for the cathedral service I must go now.’
    The thought that Jemmy would be waiting faithfully for him in the cathedral’s limpid gloom, ready to share his hymn-book, scarcely compensated him for this disappointment. He had looked forward for days to driving Jemmy out to where they could walk along the banks of the Avon or the Bourne, as they had done only once before. It was so much easier to clasp Jemmy’s hand and tell him that he loved him out in the wild than in the cathedral close, where all he could do, somehow, was earnestly describe Plato and ‘Hellas’ and the true theory of love as they walked round and round. Jemmy had been more at ease in the country. So often he looked rather bewildered: though always pleased and flattered by the attentions of so clever and kinda young man, whom he said, when pressed, he liked very much.
    Just as Christian pushed his chair back, his father did the same.
    ‘That boy is not a suitable friend for you, Christian,’ Anstey-Ward said.
    ‘So I have been saying this age past!’ said Chatty. ‘A boy who is not even a clerk, merely a shop-walker – it’s the most eccentric, provoking thing I ever heard of. When I think of the money it cost to send you to Charton –’
    ‘Is that what you mean, sir?’ said Christian, looking from his aunt’s ruddy face to his father’s. ‘That Jemmy and I belong to different classes of society?’
    Anstey-Ward looked steadily at him.
    ‘I fancy a close friendship with a boy so far beneath you socially can one way and another do you little good, though I don’t deny he seems an amiable lad. Your aunt is right, Christian, it is very eccentric.’ He added: ‘That doesn’t, to be sure, make it wrong, but surely there are equally likeable young men of your own age and rank to be found.’
    ‘Jemmy Baker has a – purity of mind which it seems to me it is impossible to find among the upper classes, certainly if most Charton boys are representative – and their masters too,’ said Christian, looking out of the window. ‘I am glad you acknowledge that there can be no real harm in my being friends with Jemmy.’
    ‘That is not precisely what I said, my boy,’ said Anstey-Ward. ‘But I do acknowledge that I had rather you had a taste for low company, so long as it were not morally low, than were a mere tuft-hunter.’
    ‘Thank you, Father,’ said Christian. He excused himself to his aunt and sister, and then left the room.
    *
    After breakfast, in his library, Anstey-Ward took a large bag of fossils from his last collecting trip out of the cupboard, and began to label and catalogue them. He already possessed a vast collection, which he housed inspecially made drawers, and sometimes he thought he ought to refrain from adding further specimens unless they were truly exceptional – but the idea was not attractive. Gathering and ordering fossils was a great pleasure to him, a pleasure that not even Rose could understand. There was also the consideration that his days were rather empty, and must be filled with constructive activity.
    Though he had a rigid schedule to which he kept conscientiously, Anstey-Ward was not an effective worker. With his grizzled hair, shrewd eyes and portly figure, he looked to be extremely solid, but his was in fact a grasshopper mind. He had achieved little by his scientific researches because, like his son, he found it difficult to concentrate for a long time on any one thing, and would constantly skip from one area of research to another, usually giving his attention directly to the large question rather than adding his mite to the small factual details which ran down and accumulated in the hour-glass of theory – or failed to do so. He did not even confine himself to the wide fields of palaeontology and geology, but had at various times been chiefly interested in mesmerism, in phrenology, and in the attempt to produce primitive forms of life out of inorganic matter by the use