His morality was neither better nor worse than the average
of his companions; but if he was sensual, he was at least not base;
and there were frail women who blessed "little Freddy," and his shy
and secret generosity, from having saved them from the lowest pit.
_Au reste_, he was idle, frivolous, useless; but with these two
palliating facts, that he knew it and regretted it; and that he never
had a chance of being aught else. His father and mother had died when
he was a child. He had been sent to Eton at seven, where he learnt
nothing, and into the Guards at seventeen, where he learnt less than
nothing. His aunt, old Lady Knockdown, who was a kind old Irish woman,
an ex-blue and ex-beauty, now a high Evangelical professor, but as
worldly as her neighbours in practice, had tried to make him a good
boy in old times: but she had given him up, long before he left Eton,
as a "vessel of wrath" (which he certainly was, with his hot Irish
temper); and since then she had only spoken of him with moans, and to
him just as if he and she had made a compact to be as worldly as they
could, and as if the fact that he was going, as she used to tell
her private friends, straight to the wrong place, was to be utterly
ignored before the pressing reality of getting him and his sisters
well married. And so it befell, that Lady Knockdown, like many more,
having begun with too high (or at least precise) a spiritual standard,
was forced to end practically in having no standard at all; and that
for ten years of Scoutbush's life, neither she nor any other human
being had spoken to him as if he had a soul to be saved, or any duty
on earth save to eat, drink, and be merry.
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