Vain Fortune | Page 3

sheep-farming and
investments in land. He had seemed to be greatly taken with his
nephew, and for many years it was understood that he would leave him
the greater part, if not the whole, of his fortune. But Mr. Burnett had
come under the influence of some poor relations, some distant cousins,
the Watsons, and had eventually decided to adopt their daughter Emily
and leave her his fortune. He did not dare intimate his change of mind
to his sister; but the news having reached Mrs. Price in various rumours,
she wrote to her brother asking him to confirm or deny these rumours;
and when he admitted their truth, Mrs. Price never spoke to him again.
She was a determined woman, and the remembrance of the wrong done
to her son never left her.
While the other children had been a torment and disgrace, Hubert had
been to his parents a consolation and a blessing. They had feared that
he too might turn to betting and drink, but he had never shown sign of
low tastes. He played no games, nor did he care for terriers or horses;
but for books and drawing, and long country walks. Immediately on
hearing of his disinheritance he had spoken at once of entering a
profession; and for many months this was the subject of consideration
in the Rectory. Hubert joined in these discussions willingly, but he
could not bring himself to accept the army or the bar. It was indeed
only necessary to look at him to see that neither soldier's tunic nor
lawyer's wig was intended for him; and it was nearly as clear that those
earnest eyes, so intelligent and yet so undetermined in their gaze, were
not those of a doctor.
But if his eyes failed to predict his future, his hands told the story of his
life distinctly enough--those long, white, languid hands, what could
they mean but art? And very soon Hubert began to draw, evincing some

natural aptitude. Then an artist came into the neighbourhood, the two
became friends, and went together on a long sketching tour. Life in the
open air, the shade of the hedge, the glare of the highway, the
meditation of the field, the languor of the river-side, the contemplation
of wooded horizons, was what Hubert's pastoral nature was most fitted
to enjoy; and, for the sake of the life it afforded him, he pursued the
calling of a landscape painter long after he had begun to feel his desire
turning in another direction. When the landscape on the canvas seemed
hopelessly inadequate, he laid aside the brush for the pencil, and strove
to interpret the summer fields in verse. From verse he drifted into the
article and the short story, and from the story into the play. And it was
in this last form that he felt himself strongest, and various were the
dramas and comedies that he dreamed from year's end to year's end.
While he was in the midst of his period of verse-writing his mother
died, and in the following year, just as he was working at his stories, he
received a telegram calling him to attend his father's death-bed. When
the old man was laid in the shadow of the weather-beaten village
church, Hubert gathered all his belongings and bade farewell for ever to
the Shropshire rectory.
In London Hubert made few friends. There were some two or three
men with whom he was frequently seen--quiet folk like himself, whose
enjoyment consisted in smoking a tranquil pipe in the evening, or going
for long walks in the country. He was one of those men whose
indefiniteness provokes curiosity, and his friends noticed and wondered
why it was that he was so frequently the theme of their conversation.
His simple, unaffected manners were full of suggestion, and in his
writings there was always an indefinable rainbow-like promise of
ultimate achievement. So, long before he had succeeded in writing a
play, detached scenes and occasional verses led his friends into gradual
belief that he was one from whom big things might be expected. And
when the one-act play which they had all so heartily approved of was
produced, and every newspaper praised it for its literary quality, the
friends took pride in this public vindication of their opinion. After the
production of his play people came to see the new author, and every
Saturday evening some fifteen or twenty men used to assemble in

Hubert's lodgings to drink whisky, smoke cigars, and talk drama.
Encouraged by his success, Hubert wrote Divorce. He worked
unceasingly upon it for more than a year, and when he had written the
final scene, he was breaking into his last hundred pounds. The play was
refused twice, and then accepted by a theatrical speculator, to whom it