And thus equipped he disappears from us for seven years into the vast and troubled world.
Laurence Renton’s state of mind when he left the Manor immediately after his father’s death was very different from that of his brother Ben. He was a different man altogether, as will be seen. He had that unconscious natural generosity of temper and unselfishness of disposition which is more a woman’s quality than a man’s. By instinct, he put himself, as it were, on the secondary level, and considered matters in general rather as they affected other people. It was no virtue in him, and he did not even know it. Such a disposition could scarcely have existed with a passionate or energetic mind; and Laurie was not energetic. He could no more have absorbed himself in a foolish passion as Ben had done, than he could have set to work with the practical sense of his younger brother. He was lazy Laurence under all circumstances; fond of philosophising over his mischances, taking most things very quietly; and he had a faculty of contenting himself with what was pleasant in whatsoever aspect it might come, which is the very death of ambition in every shape and form. He had occupied some rooms at Kensington, with a pretty studio attached to them, in his father’s lifetime, when money was plentiful. No wonder Mrs. Westbury had mourned over him, and denounced so luxurious a mode of bringing up. He was of course a younger son, and had no pretensions to lead an idle life. Providence seemed indeed to have indicated a public office, or some such moderate occupation, which would have left him time for his favourite dilettantism and required no particular activity or exercise of intellect. But Laurence had been a perplexing subject to deal with all his life. He had been one of those trying boys who have no particular bent one way or another. He was a bright, intelligent, indolent, inaccurate lad, utterly incapable of dates or facts in general, but full of social qualities,--good-natured, tender-hearted, ready to do anything for anybody. And then he had travelled a little, and drifted among an artist set, and from that day hoped and imagined himself capable of art. He had always had a certain facility in drawing, and everybody knows how easy it is to glide into the busy dawdling, the thousand pleasant trifles of occupation which fill the time of an amateur. It seemed to Laurie, as it has seemed to many another, that a life made beautiful by that faculty of discovering beauty which the humblest artist prides himself on possessing,--and the privilege of claiming a kind of membership with a noble craft,--was superior to the loftiest stool and the most dignified desk even in a Foreign Office. He was proud to call himself, as he often did, ‘a poor painter;’ and, alas! a poor painter in the literal sense of the words Laurie was. He had no genius, poor fellow! only a tender, amiable, pleasant, little talent, which would have led him into verses had his turn been literary. His friends and relations would have been more deeply shocked still had they known what a toss-up it was whether Laurie’s amateurship had taken the literary or artistic turn,--but fortunately it was the latter; and as he made pretty little sketches, and had given them away with charming liberality, and harmed nobody, it was only the high moralists, such as his Aunt Lydia, who found any fault with what he was fond of calling his ‘trade.’ And there was this to be said in his favour, that he had no expensive tastes, and that, given this mode of idleness, which he called work, Laurie’s was about as harmless a life as a young man could lead;--‘especially as he will never need to maintain himself,’ people had been used to say.