But, a drunkard himself
he set deliberately about bringing his wife to his own ways
and with most lamentable success. They had had no
children, but some months before a brother's child,
fifteen-year-old lad, had become a charge on their hands
and, with any measure of good management, would have
been a blessing to all. But Micky had gone too far. His
original weak good-nature was foundered in rum. Always
blustery and frothy, he divided the world in two --
superior officers, before whom he grovelled, and inferiors
to whom he was a mouthy, foul-tongued, contemptible
bully, in spite of a certain lingering kindness of heart that
showed itself at such rare times when he was neither
roaring drunk nor crucified by black reaction. His
brother's child, fortunately, had inherited little of the
paternal family traits, but in both body and brain favoured
his mother, the daughter of a learned divine who had spent
unusual pains on her book education, but had left her
penniless and incapable of changing that condition.
Her purely mental powers and peculiarities were such
that, a hundred years before, she might have been burned
for a witch, and fifty years later might have been honoured
as a prophetess.
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