[pg 23] CHAPTER II SIR SIMON GORE Avarice, according to Byron, is a gentlemanly vice appertaining to old age. It certainly acted like Aaron's rod with Sir Simon, as it swallowed up all his more youthful sins. During the early part of the Victorian epoch, the old man had been a spendthrift and a rake. Now, he never looked agreeably upon a woman, and the prettier they were the more he frowned upon them. As he was close upon eighty, it was not to be wondered at that his blood ran thin and cold; still, he might have retained the courtesy for which he was famous in his hot youth. But he eschewed female society in the main, and was barely civil to his pretty, fascinating niece, who attended to him and bore with his ill-humors. Only Mrs. Gilroy succeeded in extorting civil words from him, but then Mrs. Gilroy was necessary to his comfort, being a capital nurse and as quiet as a cat about the house. Where his own pleasure was concerned Sir Simon could be artful. Long ago he had given up luxury. He never put liquor to his withered lips, he ate only the plainest food, and surrounded himself with merely the bare necessities of life. All his aims were to gather money, to see it increase, to buy land, to screw the last penny out of unwilling tenants, and to pick up a farthing, in whatever mud it might be lying. He never helped the poor, he grudged repairs to the property, he kept Lucy on [pg 24] short commons, and expressed such violent opinions concerning the rector's tithes that the poor man was afraid to come near him. As Sir Simon, like a godless old pagan, never went to church, the absence of the clerical element at the Hall troubled him little. He was a typical miser in looks, being bent, withered and dry. As a young man he had bought, in his spendthrift days, a great number of suits, and these he was wearing out in his old age. The garments, once fashionable, looked queer in the eyes of a younger generation; but Sir Simon minded no one. He was always scrupulously dressed in his antique garb, and looked, as the saying goes, as neat as a new pin. His health was tolerable, although he suffered from rheumatism and a constant cough. Owing to his total abstinence, he was free from gout, but could not have been worse tempered had he indeed suffered, as he assuredly deserved to. With his withered skin, his thin, high nose, his pinched features and his bent form he looked anything but agreeable. When walking he supported himself with an ebony cane, and had been known on occasions to use it on the backs of underlings. From this practice, however, he had desisted, since the
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