Galbraith

“ Galbraith ugly?" Mrs. Beale exclaimed, "Now, I think he has the nicest face!"
"A most good-looking kind of ugliness," said Mrs. Orton Beg.
Menteith perceived that any attempt to disparage Dr. Galbraith in that set was a mistake, and retired from the position cleverly. "There is a kind of ugliness which is attractive in a man," he said with his infectious smile.
Edith responded, and then they drew apart from the rest, and began to talk to each other exclusively.
There was a bright tinge of colour in her transparent cheeks, her eyes sparkled, and a pleased perpetual smile hovered about her lips. ”

“ The old fellow's eyes filled with tears at the gentle words which his young mistress whispered to him as he carried her through the marble archway and up the long steep stairs.
"Tanto ricca, tanto giovine, tanto bella, e bisogna che muore." Galbraith understood the words muttered by the old servant as he passed him after having laid his burden at rest in the great chair. ”

“ Block, indeed, let his eyes follow the retreating Galbraith with a momentary look of outraged astonishment. Her wits, quickened by the emergency, interpreted the look. Galbraith, chucking her into the water indeed, had thrown her a life-preserver—the tip that her wares were good.
Goldsmith, quicker and shrewder than his junior, was already smiling politely. "They really are very good," he said. "If they are not too expensive for us, we'll consider buying them."
"They'll be," said Rose, "the twelve of them, four hundred and sixty-five dollars." ”

“ She had been living, since that day of his departure for New York, when she had felt the last of his strong embraces, a life that fell into two hemispheres as distinct from each other as tropic night from day. One half of it had been lighted and made tolerable by the exactions of her new job. "What you feel like doing isn't important, and what I tell you to do is," John Galbraith had said to her on the day this strange divided life of hers had begun. ”

“ The people on the stage and in the wings didn't know what she'd done, nor in what character she was about to appear, but they did know she was, from now on, something besides a chorus-girl.
Rose obediently crossed the runway and walked up the aisle to where Galbraith stood with Goldsmith and Block, waiting for her. She was still feeling a little numb and empty.
Galbraith, as she came up, held out a hand to her. "I congratulate you, Miss Dane," he said. "They're admirable. With all the money in the world, I wouldn't ask for anything handsomer." ”

“ But is there anything wrong at the Castle?"
"The same old thing," said Dr. Galbraith, with a twinkle in his bright gray eyes. "The Duke has been seeing visions—determination of blood to the head; and Lady Fulda has been dreaming dreams—fatigue and fasting. Food and rest for her—she will be undisturbed by dreams to-night; and a severe course of dieting for him."
Mrs. Orton Beg smiled. "Really life is becoming too prosaic," she said, "since you dreadfully clever people began to discover a reason for everything. ”

“ For the first month after she came to New York to work for him she had found Galbraith a martinet. She never once caught that twinkling gleam of understanding in his eye that had meant so much to her during the rehearsals of The Girl Up-stairs. His manner toward her carried out the tone of the letter she'd got from him in Centropolis. It was stiff, formal, severe. He seldom praised her work and never ungrudgingly. His censure was rare too, to be sure, but this obviously was because Rose almost never gave him an excuse for it. ”

“ By no means a learned man, yet with a sympathetic manner and a fund of quiet humour that attracted all who came under its influence, Galbraith was enabled to hold his flock together when their naturally flighty nature and mutual jealousies would have driven them to dissolve with curses. ”

“ The fierce natural instinct of redressing an insult by a personal chastisement moved the refined man. Poet-artist as he was, he would rather, a thousand times, have grappled with Galbraith in a fierce struggle, than have been forced to receive and accept his apology. ”

“ It was mid-afternoon, and Galbraith was on watch, Buxton was asleep in the saloon, and I was reading a book. I came on deck with a jump, Buxton hard at my heels. Galbraith was staring down at the engineer, flinging questions at him which that scalded artisan answered with groans and tossings. It did not take us long to estimate the damage. It was irreparable. The water was pouring in the broken stern-bearings, flooding the engines. In time the Patrick Dare would sink. True, she might live for a day. She might live for a week, could we get the pumps going. ”

“ All men of the prairie spoke well of him. The great new lands have codes and standards of morals quite their own. One enthusiastic admirer of this youth said, in Jen’s hearing, “He’s a Christian—Val Galbraith!” That was the western way of announcing a man as having great civic and social virtues. Perhaps the respect for Val Galbraith was deepened by the fact that there was no broncho or cayuse that he could not tame to the saddle. ”

“ They only bother people."
But of course they had to be opened and read—even the bulky parcel from Strathgovan. The only bit of intelligence that came from that quarter was to the effect that Tom Galbraith had been jilted by his lady-love; but as the rumour, it appeared, was in circulation among the Glasgow artists, the Laird instantly and indignantly refused to believe it. Envy is the meanest of the passions; and we knew that the Glasgow artists could scarcely sleep in their bed at night for thinking of the great fame of Mr. Galbraith of Edinburgh. ”

“ Galbraith was a gentle sweet woman, who loved her husband, but was capable of loving a greater man better. Had she lived long enough to allow of their opinions confronting in the matter of their child’s education, serious differences would probably have arisen between them ”

“ Our knowledge of humanity, how much more our knowledge of the Father of it, is moving as yet but in the first elements.
In his shed under the stair it had been dark for some time—too dark for work, that is, and George Galbraith had lighted a candle: he never felt at liberty to leave off so long as a man was recognizable in the street by daylight. But now at last, with a sigh of relief, he rose. The hour of his redemption was come, the moment of it at hand. Outwardly calm, he was within eager as a lover to reach Lucky Croale’s back parlour. ”

“ The sight of the author out in the hall invoking his gods to witness that this girl who had presumed to change his lines, was an idiot incapable of articulate speech, brought her out of her daze. But even then she couldn't get anything quite right. There seemed to be no golden mean between the bellow of a fireman and a tone which Galbraith assured her wouldn't be audible three rows back. ”

“ When the poor fellow sat with his drinking companions in Mistress Croale’s parlour, seldom a flash broke from the reverie in which he seemed sunk, to show in what region of fancy his spirit wandered, or to lighten the dulness that would not unfrequently invade that forecourt of hell. For even the damned must at times become aware of what they are, and then surely a terrible though momentary hush must fall upon the forsaken region. Yet those drinking companions would have missed George Galbraith, silent as he was, and but poorly responsive to the wit and humour of the rest ”

“ Then she went on: "With Miss Farnham out of it—and I knew [Pg 442] she must be out of it, since Broffin didn't strike—there was still Mr. Galbraith. You didn't know why I was so anxious to have you get acquainted with him, but you know now. And it worked. When Broffin asked him to identify you, he couldn't—or wouldn't. Then came that unlucky drowning accident."
Griswold nodded slowly. "Yes, Mr. Galbraith knows me now."
"He doesn't!" she exulted. "He is a dear old saint, and he will never know you again as the man who held him up. ”

“ He said between his teeth: 'Look out, Snow Devil, you Injin dog, or I'll have your heart. Do you think a white girl is like a redskin woman, to be sold as you sell your wives and daughters to the squaw-men and white loafers, you reptile?' Then the Injin said an ugly word about Val's sister, and Val shot him dead like lightning.... Yes, that is good to swear, Galbraith. You are not the only one that curses the law in this world. It is not Justice that fills the gaols, but Law. ”

“ But with these lines to say ..."
"Now listen to me," said John Galbraith; "listen as hard as you can. Because when I've done talking, you will have to make up your mind. In the first place you wouldn't be 'safe,' as you said, even in the chorus. A make-up isn't a disguise. You will be rouged and powdered, your eyelashes blackened, your lips reddened and so on, not to make you look different, but to keep you looking the same under the strong lights. You're not the sort of person to escape notice. That's the reason I made up my mind to hire you before I knew you could dance. ”

“ And all the while the lover in me was trying to have all of you there was. It's a hard thing to talk sense about."
"A man told me," Rose said, "—John Galbraith told me, that he couldn't be a woman's friend and her lover at the same time, any more than a steel spring could be made soft so that it would bend in your fingers like copper, and still be a spring. He said that was true of him, anyway, and he felt sure it was true of nine men out of a dozen. Do you think it's true? ”

“ My people travel faster than white men, and a few hours after I heard—oh, Galbrth! I heard that you had gone—gone for ever to the white settlement. I threw myself in agony on the ground; but I could not weep. My head felt on fire, and at last, starting up, I resolved to follow you. Creeping, in the confusion, out of the kraal, I fled to the bush. I did not care if I died there: I only felt I could no longer live with my people when you were away.”
“And the fire last night, Zenuta?” ”

“ Until we have got Angus Sutherland on board. But what she really said was, after slight hesitation:
"——until we set out for the Northern Hebrides."
"Ay, it's a good thing to feel nervous about beginning," says the Laird, as the long sweep of the four oars brings us nearer and nearer to the Iona shores. "I have often heard Tom Galbraith say that to the younger men. He says if a young man is over confident, he'll come to nothing. But there was a good one I once heard Galbraith tell about a young man that was pentin at Tarbert—that's Tarbert on Loch Fyne, Miss Avon. ”

“ Galbraith's speech, but no intelligible phrases came to his tongue.
"Life is a strangely perverse game, isn't it?"' mused the capitalist. "We build our castles, build them not alone for ourselves but for others, and those we love shatter the structure we have so painstakingly reared and on its ruined site make for themselves castles of their own."
His eyes were fixed on the narrowing ribbon of sand over which the car sped.
"I—I—have another surprise for you, Bob," he said in a lower tone, without lifting his gaze from the reach of highway ahead. "Cynthia is to be married." ”

“ The indignation of better men than the laird with even a confessedly harmless superstition, is sometimes very amusing; and it was a point of Mr. Galbraith’s poverty-stricken religion to denounce all superstitions, however diverse in character, with equal severity. To believe in the second sight, for instance, or in any form of life as having the slightest relation to this world, except that of men, that of animals, and that of vegetables, was with him wicked, antagonistic to the Church of Scotland, and inconsistent with her perfect doctrine. ”

“ In those days I accepted most of what was as right and proper. I might try to explain, but I don't remember questioning the justice of fate or Providence. I was young, and why should I? Age brings the doubts that hurt and destroy.
"One thing did impress itself slowly on my mind: the difference between Buxton and the acting second mate. Buxton was cock-sure, able, alert, loud-mouthed, quite fancy at times in his language and his notions of his own dignity. Galbraith was silent, slow, impassive, inexorably busy, never giving utterance to a thought, an imagination, or anything but an order. ”

“ Once, Jack broke the silence in a rather loud whisper, saying,—
“I say, Dick Galbraith, old fellow just ask the minister to take a peep at that book-larning he carries in his head, and see if he can’t tell me why this cussed hole was made—if its natur or Kaffir architecture.”
“I believe, my friend,” answered the minister, “that you have fallen into a pit, dug by its depth, to catch giraffes. Ah! by the way, tell me, is there not a bank of earth left in the centre?”
“Yes,” answered Thompson, “that there is ”

“ Galbraith’s first care was to rid his flanks of the enemy. Covered by the fire of the guns and the steady and well-directed volleys of the Royal Irish, the 34th Pioneers drove the hillmen from the jungle on the left, while the 4th Punjab infantry scaled the precipitous heights on the right, pushing the foe before them in confusion. But the process took time, and it was not until 1 P.M. that the Royal Irish were allowed to move towards the enemy in the plain, where many flags showed that the tribesmen were assembled in large numbers. ”

“ Galbraith admitted it was beautiful, but wasn't overwhelmed at all as he had been by the other.
"It's not quite so much your style, is it? Not drive enough?"
"It isn't for me," said Rose. "It's for Olga Larson to wear in that All Alone number for the sextette."
"Why Larson especially?" he asked. "Except that she's a friend of yours."
"She isn't," said Rose, "particularly. And anyway, that wouldn't be a reason. But—did you ever really look at her? She's the one really beautiful woman in the company." ”