Young Blood
by E. W. Hornung · English · Gutenberg #42902 · 497,660 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Young Blood
Author: E. W. Hornung
Release date: June 9, 2013 [eBook #42902]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YOUNG BLOOD ***
_BY THE SAME AUTHOR._
A BRIDE FROM THE BUSH.
UNDER TWO SKIES.
TINY LUTTRELL.
THE BOSS OF TAROOMBA.
THE UNBIDDEN GUEST.
THE ROGUE'S MARCH.
IRRALIE'S BUSHRANGER.
MY LORD DUKE.
YOUNG BLOOD
BY
E. W. HORNUNG
"_When all the world is young, lad,
And all the trees are green;
And every goose a swan, lad,
And every lass a queen;
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
And round the world away;
Young blood must have its course, lad,
And every dog his day._"
THE WATER BABIES.
CASSELL AND COMPANY, LIMITED
_LONDON, PARIS & MELBOURNE_
1898
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CHAPTER I.
THE OLD HOME 1
CHAPTER II.
THE BREAKING OF THE NEWS 11
CHAPTER III.
THE SIN OF THE FATHER 20
CHAPTER IV.
THE NEW HOME 32
CHAPTER V.
A WET BLANKET 40
CHAPTER VI.
THE GAME OF BLUFF 57
CHAPTER VII.
ON RICHMOND HILL 71
CHAPTER VIII.
A MILLIONAIRE IN THE MAKING 85
CHAPTER IX.
THE CITY OF LONDON 95
CHAPTER X.
A FIRST OFFENCE 111
CHAPTER XI.
BEGGAR AND CHOOSER 122
CHAPTER XII.
THE CHAMPION OF THE GODS 135
CHAPTER XIII.
THE DAY OF BATTLE 150
CHAPTER XIV.
A CHANGE OF LUCK 165
CHAPTER XV.
IT NEVER RAINS BUT IT POURS 175
CHAPTER XVI.
A DAME'S SCHOOL 183
CHAPTER XVII.
AT FAULT 195
CHAPTER XVIII.
MR. SCRAFTON 203
CHAPTER XIX.
ASSAULT AND BATTERY 214
CHAPTER XX.
BIDING HIS TIME 226
CHAPTER XXI.
HAND TO HAND 234
CHAPTER XXII.
MAN TO MAN 247
CHAPTER XXIII.
THE END OF THE BEGINNING 259
CHAPTER XXIV.
YOUNG INK 276
CHAPTER XXV.
SCRAFTON'S STORY 287
CHAPTER XXVI.
A MASTERSTROKE 304
CHAPTER XXVII.
RESTITUTION 315
CHAPTER XXVIII.
A TALE APART 326
Transcriber's Note: Minor typographical errors have been corrected
without note. Irregularities and inconsistencies in the text have been
retained as printed. The cover of this ebook was created by the
transcriber and is hereby placed in the public domain.
Young Blood.
CHAPTER I.
THE OLD HOME.
Harry Ringrose came of age on the happiest morning of his life. He was
on dry land at last, and flying north at fifty miles an hour instead of
at some insignificant and yet precarious number of knots. He would be
at home to eat his birthday breakfast after all; and half the night he
sat awake in a long ecstasy of grateful retrospect and delicious
anticipation, as one by one the familiar stations were hailed and left
behind, each an older friend than the last, and each a deadlier enemy
to sleep. Worn out by excitement, however, he lay down for a minute
between Crewe and Warrington, and knew no more until the guard came to
him at the little junction across the Westmoreland border. Harry
started up, the early sun in his sleepy eyes, and for an instant the
first-class smoking-compartment was his state-room aboard the ship
_Sobraon_, and the guard one of his good friends the officers. Then
with a rush of exquisite joy the glorious truth came home to him, and
he was up and out that instant--the happiest and the luckiest young
rascal in the land.
It was the 19th of May, and a morning worthy the month and the
occasion. The sun had risen in a flawless sky, and the dear old English
birds were singing on all sides of the narrow platform, as Harry
Ringrose stretched his spindle-legs upon it and saw his baggage out of
the long lithe express and into the little clumsy local which was to
carry him home. The youth was thin and tall, yet not ungainly, with a
thatch of very black hair, but none upon his sun-burnt face. He was
shabbily dressed, his boots were down at heel and toe, there were
buttons missing from his old tweed coat, and he wore a celluloid collar
with his flannel shirt. On the other hand, he was travelling
first-class, and the literary supplies tucked under his arm had cost
the extravagant fellow several shillings at Euston book-stall. Yet he
had very little money in his pocket. He took it all out to count. It
amounted to five shillings and sixpence exactly, of which he gave
half-a-crown to the guard for waking him, and a shilling to a porter
here at the junction, before continuing his journey in the little
train. This left him a florin, and that florin was all the money he
possessed in the world.
He was, however, the only child of a father who would give him as much
as he wanted, and, what was rarer, of one with sufficient sense of
humour to appreciate the prodigal's return without a penny in his
pocket or a decent garment on his back. Whether his people would be
equally pleased at being taken completely by surprise was not quite so
certain. They might say he ought to have let them know what ship he was
coming by, or at least have sent a telegram on landing. Yet all along
he had undertaken to be home for his twenty-first birthday, and it
would only have made them anxious to know that he had trusted himself
to a sailing-vessel. Fifty days instead of twenty from the Cape! It had
nearly cost him his word; but, now that it was over, the narrow margin
made the joke all the greater; and Harry Ringrose loved a joke better
than most things in the world.
The last two years of his life had been a joke from beginning to end:
for in the name of health he had been really seeking adventure and
undergoing the most unnecessary hardships for the fun of talking about
them for the rest of his days. He pictured the first dinner-party after
his return, and the faces of some dozen old friends when they heard of
the leopards under the house, the lion in the moonlight, and (when the
ladies had withdrawn) of the notorious murderer with whom Harry had
often dined. They should perceive that the schoolboy they remembered
was no longer anything of the sort, but a man of the world who had seen
more of it than themselves. It is true that for a man of the world
Harry Ringrose was still somewhat youthfully taken up with himself and
his experiences; but his heart was rich with love of those to whom he
was returning, and his mind much too simple to be aware of its own
egotism. He only knew that he was getting nearer and nearer home, and
that the joy of it was almost unendurable.
His face was to the carriage window, his native air streamed down his
throat and blew a white lane through his long black hair. Miles of
green dales rushed past under a network of stone walls, to change soon
to mines and quarries, which in their turn developed into furnaces and
works, until all at once the sky was no longer blue and the land no
longer green. And when Harry Ringrose looked out of the opposite
window, it was across grimy dunes that stretched to a breakwater built
of slag, with a discoloured sea beyond.
The boy rolled up his rug and changed his cap for a villainous sombrero
preserved for the occasion. He then made a selection from his lavish
supply of periodical literature, and when he next looked out the train
was running in the very shadow of some furnaces in full blast. The
morning sun looked cool and pale behind their monstrous fires, and
Harry took off the sombrero to his father's ironworks, though with a
rather grim eye, which saw the illuminated squalor of the scene without
appreciating its prosperity. Sulphurous flames issued from all four
furnaces; at one of the four they were casting as the train passed, and
the molten incandescent stream ran white as the wire of an electric
light.
After the works came rank upon rank of workmen's streets running right
and left of the line; then the ancient and historic quarter of the
town, with its granite houses and its hilly streets, all much as it had
been a hundred years before the discovery of iron-stone enriched and
polluted a fair countryside. Then the level-crossing, without a
creature at the gates at such an hour; finally a blank drab platform
with the long loose figure of the head-porter standing out upon it as
the homeliest sight of all. Harry clapped him on the cap as the train
drew up; but either the man had forgotten him, or he was offended, for
he came forward without a smile.
"Well, David, how are you? Your hand, man, your hand! I'm back from the
wilds. Don't you know me?"
"I do now, sir."
"That's right! It does me good to see an old face like yours. Gently
with this green box, David, it's full of ostrich-eggs, that's why I had
it in the carriage. There's four more in the van; inspan the lot till
we send in for them, will you? I mean to walk up myself. Come, gently,
I say!"
The porter had dropped the green box clumsily, and now sought to cover
his confusion by saying that the sight of Master Harry, that altered,
had taken him all aback. Young Ringrose was justly annoyed; he had
taken such care of that green box for so many weeks. But he did not
withhold the florin, which was being pocketed for a penny when the man
saw what it was and handed it back.
"What, not enough for you?" cried Harry.
"No, sir, too much."
The boy stared and laughed.
"Don't be an ass, David; I don't come home from Africa every day! If
you'd been with me you'd think yourself lucky to get home at all! You
just inspan those boxes, and we'll send for them after breakfast."
The man mumbled that it was not worth two shillings. Harry said that
was his business. The porter hung his head.
"I--I may have broken them eggs."
"Oh, well, if you have, two bob won't mend 'em; cling on to it, man,
and don't drop them again."
The loose-limbed porter turned away with the coin, but without a word,
while Harry went off in high good-humour, though a little puzzled by
the man's manner. It was not a time to think twice of trifles, however,
and, at all events, he had achieved the sportsmanlike feat of emptying
his pockets of their last coin. He strode out of the station with a
merry, ringing tread. Half the town heard him as he went whistling
through the streets and on to the outlying roads.
The one he took was uphill and countrified. High hedgerows bloomed on
either hand, and yet you could hear the sea, and sometimes see it, and
on this side of the town it was blue and beautiful. Our wayfarer met
but one other, a youth of his own age, with whom he had played and
fought since infancy, though the families had never been intimate.
Harry halted and held out his hand, which was ignored, the other
passing with his nose in the air, and a tin can swinging at his side,
on his way to some of the works. Harry coloured up and said a hard word
softly. Then he remembered how slow his old friend the porter had been
to recognise him; and he began to think he must have grown up out of
knowledge. Besides accounting for what would otherwise have been an
inexplicable affront, the thought pleased and flattered him. He strode
on serenely as before, sniffing the Irish Sea at every step.
He passed little lodges and great gates with never a glance at the fine
houses within: for to Harry Ringrose this May morning there were but
one house and one garden in all England. To get to them he broke at
last into a run, and only stopped when the crest of the hill brought
him, breathless, within sight of both. There was the long front wall,
with the gates at one end, the stables at the other, and the fresh
leaves bulging over every intervening brick. And down the hill, behind
the trees, against the sea, were the windows, the gables, the chimneys,
that he had been dreaming of for two long years.
His eyes filled with a sudden rush of tears. "Thank God!" he muttered
brokenly, and stood panting in the road, with bowed bare head and
twitching lips. He could not have believed that the mere sight of home
would so move him. He advanced in an altered spirit, a sense of his own
unworthiness humbling him, a hymn of thanksgiving in his heart.
And now the very stones were eloquent, and every yard marked by some
landmark forgotten for two years, and yet familiar as ever at the first
glance. Here was the mark a drunken cabman had left on the gatepost in
Harry's school-days; there the disused summerhouse with the window
still broken by which Harry had escaped when locked in by the very
youth who had just cut him on the road. The drive struck him as a
little more overgrown. The trees were greener than he had ever known
them, the bank of rhododendrons a mass of pink without precedent in his
recollection; but then it was many years since Harry had seen the place
so late in May, for he had gone out to Africa straight from school.
As for the dear house, the creepers had spread upon the ruddy stone and
the tiles had mellowed, but otherwise there seemed to be no change. It
would look its old self when the blinds were up: meantime Harry fixed
his eyes upon those behind which his parents would still be fast
asleep, and he wondered, idly at first, why they had given up sleeping
with a window open. It had been their practice all the year round; and
the house had been an early-rising house; yet not a fire was
lighted--not a chimney smoking--not a window open--not a blind
drawn--though close upon seven o'clock by the silver watch that had
been with Harry through all his adventures.
His hand shook as he put the watch back in his pocket. The possibility
of his parents being away--of his surprise recoiling upon himself--had
never occurred to him until now. How could they be away? They never
dreamt of going away before the autumn. Besides, he had told them he
was coming home in time to keep his birthday. They were not away--they
were not--they were not!
Yet there he stood--in the sweep of the drive--but a few yards from the
steps--and yet afraid to ring and learn the truth! As though the truth
must be terrible; as though it would be a tragedy if they did happen to
be from home!
It would serve him right if they were.
So at last, with such a smile as a man may force on the walk to the
gallows, Harry Ringrose dragged himself slowly to the steps, and still
more slowly up them; for they were dirty; and something else about the
entrance was different, though he could not at first tell what. It was
not the bell, which he now pulled, and heard clanging in the kitchen
loud enough to rouse the house; he was still wondering what it was when
the last slow tinkling cut his speculations short.
Strange how so small a sound should carry all the way from the kitchen!
He rang again before peering through one of the narrow ruby panes that
lighted the porch on each side of the door. He could see no farther
than the wall opposite, for the inner door was to the right, and in the
rich crimson light the porch looked itself at first sight. Then
simultaneously Harry missed the mat, the hat stand, a stag's antlers;
and in another instant he knew what it was that had struck him as
different about the entrance. He ought not to have been able to peer
through that coloured light at all. The sill should have supported the
statuette of Night which matched a similar representation of Morning on
the other side of the door. Both were gone; and the distant bell, still
pealing lustily from his second tug, was breaking the silence of an
empty house.
Harry was like a man waking from a trance: the birds sang loud in his
ears, the sun beat hot on his back, while he himself stood staring at
his own black shadow on the locked door, and wondering what it was, for
it never moved. Then, in a sudden frenzy, he struck his hand through
the ruby glass, and plucked out the pieces the putty still held in
place, until he was able to squeeze through bodily. Blood dripped from
his fingers and smeared the handle of the unlocked inner door as he
seized and turned it and sprang within. The hall was empty. The stairs
were bare.
He ran into room after room; all were stripped from floor to ceiling.
The sun came in rods through the drawn blinds: on the walls were the
marks of the pictures: on the floors, a stray straw here and there.
He cried aloud and railed in his agony. He shouted through the house,
and his voice came back to him from the attics. Suddenly, in a grate,
he espied a printed booklet. It was an auctioneer's list. The sale had
taken place that very month.
The calmness of supreme misery now stole over Harry Ringrose, and he
saw that his fingers were bleeding over the auctioneer's list. He took
out his handkerchief and wiped them carefully--he had no tears to
staunch--and bound up the worst finger with studious deliberation.
Apathy succeeded frenzy, and, utterly dazed, he sat down on the stairs,
for there was nowhere else to sit, and for some minutes the only sound
in the empty house was the turning of the leaves of the auctioneer's
list.
Suddenly he leapt to his feet: another sound had broken the silence,
and it was one that he seemed to have heard only yesterday: a sound so
familiar in his home, so home-like in itself, that it seemed even now
to give the lie to his wild and staring eyes.
It was the sound of wheels in the gravel drive.
CHAPTER II.
THE BREAKING OF THE NEWS.
Harry was in three minds in as many seconds: he would hide, he would
rush out and learn the truth, he would first see who it was that had
followed him at such an hour. The last impulse prevailed, and the study
was the room from which to peep. Harry crept in on tiptoe, past the
bookshelves eloquently bare, to the bow-window with the drawn Venetian
blinds. Slightly raising one of the laths, he could see everything as
the cab drew up at the steps.
The cab-door was flung open and out sprang an utter stranger to Harry
Ringrose. This was a middle-aged man of the medium height, wearing a
somewhat shabby tall hat and a frock-coat which shone unduly in the
strong sunlight. He had a fresh complexion, a reddish moustache
streaked with grey, a sharp-pointed nose, and a very deep chin which
needed shaving; but what struck Harry first and last were the keen,
decisive eyes, twinkling behind glasses with gold rims, which went
straight to the broken window and surveyed it critically before their
owner had set foot on the steps. It seemed that the cabman saw it too
and made some remark; for the fare turned upon him, paid him and
slammed his door, and ordered him off in a very peremptory voice which
Harry heard distinctly. The cab turned in the sweep and disappeared
among the trees. Then the stranger came slowly up the steps, with his
eyes once more fixed upon the broken window. In another moment they had
run like lightning over the face of the house, and, before Harry had
time to move, had met his own.
The stranger raised his eyebrows, shook his head, and pointed to the
front door. Harry went to it, shot the bolts back, turned the key, and
flung the door wide open. He was trembling now with simple terror. His
tongue would not ask what had happened. It was like standing to be
shot, and having to give the signal to the firing party.
The other seemed to feel it almost equally: his fresh face was pale,
and his quick eyes still with sorrow and compunction. It was evident he
knew the worst. If only he would tell it unasked!
"My name is Lowndes," he began at last. "Gordon Lowndes--you must have
heard of me?"
"I--I don't remember it," stammered Harry at the second attempt.
"I stayed here several times while you were in Africa. I was here in
February."
"Yes, now I remember your name: it was in the last letter I had."
He could say this calmly; and yet his lips could not frame the question
whose answer would indeed be life or death.
"Two years ago I did not know your people," resumed the other. "But for
two years I have been their most intimate friend."
"Tell me," at length whispered Harry: "is--either of them--dead?" And
he awaited the worst with a sudden fortitude.
Mr. Lowndes shook his head.
"Not that I know of," said he.
"Thank God!" the boy burst out, with the first break in his voice.
"Nothing else matters--nothing--nothing! I made sure it was that! Can
you swear that my father is all right?"
The other winced. "To the best of my knowledge," said he almost
sharply.
"And my mother?"
"Yes, yes, I was with her three days ago."
"Where?"
"In London."
"London! And I passed through London last night! You saw her, you say,
three days ago, and she was all right then?"
"I never knew her look better."
"Then tell me the worst and let us have it over! I can see that we have
lost our money--but that doesn't matter. Nothing matters if they are
all right; won't you come in, sir, and tell me all?"
Harry did not know it, for in his deep emotion he had lost sight of
self; but there was something infinitely touching in the way the young
man stood aside and ushered his senior into the hall as though it were
still his home. Mr. Lowndes shook his head at the unconscious air, and
he entered slowly, with it bent. Harry shut the doors behind them, and
they turned into the first room. It was the room with the empty
bookshelves; and it still smelt of Harry's father's cheroots.
"You may wonder at my turning up like this," said Lowndes; "but for
those fools at the shipping-office I should have met you at the docks.
I undertook to do so, and to break the news to you there."
"But how could you know my ship?"
The other smiled.
"Cable," said he; "that was a very simple matter. But if your shipping
fellows hadn't sworn you'd be reported from the Lizard, in lots of time
for me to get up from Scotland to meet you, I should never have run
down there as I was induced to do on business the night before last. I
should have let the business slide. As it was the telegram reached me
last night in Glasgow, when I knew it was too late to keep you out of
this. Still, I timed myself to get here five minutes before you, and
should have done it if my train hadn't been forty minutes late. It--it
must have been the devil's own quarter-of-an-hour for you, Ringrose!
Have a drop of this before we go on; it'll do you good."
He took a flask from his pocket and half filled the cup with raw
whisky, which Harry seized gratefully and drained at a gulp. In truth,
the shock of the morning, after the night's excitement, had left him
miserably faint. The spirit revived him a little.
"You are very kind to me," he said, returning the cup. "You must be a
great friend of my parents for them to give you this job, and a good
friend to take it on! Now, if you please, tell me every mortal thing;
you will tell me nothing I cannot bear; but I am sure you are too kind
to keep anything back."
Lowndes was gazing with a shrewd approval upon the plucky young fellow,
in whom, indeed, disappointment and disaster had so far awakened only
what was best. At the last words, however, the quick eyes fell behind
the gold-rimmed glasses in a way that made Harry wonder whether he had
indeed been told the worst. And yet there was already more than enough
to account for the other's embarrassment; and he determined not to add
to it by unnecessary or by impatient questions.
"You are doubtless aware," began Lowndes, "that the iron trade in this
country has long been going from bad to worse? You have heard of the
bad times, I imagine, before to-day?"
Harry nodded: he had heard of the bad times as long as he could
remember. But because the happy conditions of his own boyhood had not
been affected by the cry, he had believed that it was nothing else. He
was punished now.
"The times," proceeded Lowndes, "have probably been bad since your
childhood. How old are you now?"
"Twenty-one to-day."
"To-day!"
"Go on," said Harry, hoarsely. "Don't be sorry for me. I deserve very
little sympathy." His hands were in the pockets he had wilfully emptied
of every coin.
"When you were five years old," continued Lowndes, "the pig-iron your
father made fetched over five pounds a ton; before you were seven it
was down to two-pounds-ten; it never picked up again; and for the last
ten years it hasn't averaged two pounds. Shall I tell you what that
means? For these ten years your father has been losing a few shillings
on every ton of pig-iron produced--a few hundred pounds every week of
his life!"
"And I was enjoying myself at school, and now in Africa! Oh," groaned
Harry Ringrose, "go on, go on; but don't waste any pity on me."
"You may be a very rich man, but that sort of thing can't last for
ever. The end is bound to come, and in your father's case it came,
practically speaking, several years ago."
"Several years? I don't follow you. He never failed?"
"It would have been better for you all if he had. You have looked upon
this place as your own, I suppose, from as far back as you can remember
down to this morning?"
"As my father's own--decidedly."
"It has belonged to his bankers for at least five years."
"How do you know?" cried Harry hotly.
"He told me himself, when I first came down here, now eighteen months
ago. We met in London, and he asked me down. I was in hopes we might do
business together; but it was no go."
"What sort of business?"
"I wanted him to turn the whole thing into a Limited Liability
Company," said Gordon Lowndes, reeling off the last three words as
though he knew them better than his own name; "I mean those useless
blast-furnaces! What good were they doing? None at all. Three bob a ton
on the wrong side! That's all the good they'd done for years, and
that's all they were likely to do till times changed. Times never will
change--to what they were when you were breeched--but that's a detail.
Your father's name down here was as sweet as honey. All he'd got to do
was to start an extra carriage or two, put up for Parliament on the
winning side, and turn his works into a Limited Liability Company. I'd
have promoted it. I'd have seen it through in town. The best men would
have gone on the board, and we'd have done the bank so well in shares
that they wouldn't have got out of it if they could. We'd have made a
spanking good thing of it if only the governor would have listened to
reason. He wouldn't; said he'd rather go down with the ship than let in
a lot of shareholders. 'Damn the shareholders!' says I. 'Why count the
odds in the day of battle?' It's the biggest mistake you can make,
Ringrose, and your governor kept on making it! It was in this very
room, and he was quite angry with me. He wouldn't let me say another
word. And what happens? A year or so later--this last February--he
wires me to come down at once. Of course I came, but it was as I
thought: the bank's sick of it, and threatens to foreclose. I went to
see them; not a bit of good. Roughly speaking, it was a case of either
paying off half the mortgage and reconstructing the whole bag of
tricks, or going through the courts to beggary. Twenty thousand was the
round figure; and I said I'd raise it if it was to be raised."
This speech had barely occupied a minute, so rapidly was it spoken; and
there was much of it which Harry, in his utter ignorance of all such
matters, would have found difficult to follow at a much slower rate of
utterance. As it was, however, it filled him with distrust of his
father's friend, who, on his own showing, had made some proposal
dishonourable in the eyes of a high-principled man. Moreover, it came
instinctively to Harry that he had caught a first glimpse of the real
Gordon Lowndes, with his cunning eyes flashing behind his _pince-nez_,
the gestures of a stump orator, and this stream of unintelligible
jargon gushing from his lips. The last sentences, however, were plain
enough even to Harry's understanding.
"You said you'd raise it," he repeated dryly; "yet you can't have done
so."
"I raised ten thousand."
"Only half; well?"
"It was no use."
"My father would refuse to touch it?"
"N-no."
"Then what did he do?"
Lowndes drew back a pace, saying nothing, but watching the boy with
twitching eyelids.
"Come, sir, speak out!" cried Harry, "He will tell me himself, you
know, when I get back to London."
"He is not there."
"You said he was!"
"I said your mother was."
"Where is my father, then?"
"On the Continent--we think."
"You think? And the--ten thousand pounds?"
"He has it with him," said Lowndes, in a low voice. "I'm sorry to say
he--bolted with the lot!"
CHAPTER III.
THE SIN OF THE FATHER.
"It's a lie!"
The word flew through Harry's teeth as in another century his sword
might have flown from its sheath; and so blind was he with rage and
horror that he scarcely appreciated its effect on Gordon Lowndes. Never
was gross insult more mildly taken. The elder man did certainly change
colour for an instant; in another he had turned away with a shrug, and
in yet another he was round again with a sad half-smile. Harry glared
at him in a growing terror. He saw that he was forgiven; a blow had
disconcerted him less.
"I expected you to jump down my throat," observed Lowndes, with a
certain twitching of the sharp nose which came and went with the
intermittent twinkle in his eyes.
"It is lucky you are not a younger man, or you would have got even more
than you expected!"
"For telling you the truth? Well, well, I admire your spirit,
Ringrose."
"It is not the truth," said Harry doggedly, his chest heaving, and a
cold sweat starting from his skin.
"I wish to God it were not!"
"You mean to tell me my father absconded?"
"That is the word I should have used."
"With ten thousand pounds that did not belong to him?"
"Not exactly that; the money was lent to him, but for another purpose.
He has misapplied rather than misappropriated it."
Harry felt his head swimming. Disaster he might bear--but disaster
rooted in disgrace! He gazed in mute misery upon the stripped but still
familiar room; he breathed hard, and the stale odour of his father's
cheroots became a sudden agony in his dilated nostrils. Something told
him that what he had heard was true. That did not make it easier to
believe--on the bare word of a perfect stranger.
"Proofs!" he gasped. "What proofs have you? Have you any?"
Lowndes produced a pocket-book and extracted a number of newspaper
cuttings.
"Yes," sighed he, "I have almost everything that has appeared about it
in the papers. It will be cruel reading for you, Ringrose; but you may
take it better so than from anybody's lips. The accounts in the local
press--the creditors' meetings and so forth--are, however, rather long.
Hadn't you better wait until we're on our way back to town?"
"Wait? No, show me something now! I apologise for what I said; I made
use of an unpardonable word; but--I don't believe it yet!"
"Here, then," said Lowndes, "if you insist. Here's a single short
paragraph from the _P.M.G._ It would appear about the last day in
March."
"The day I sailed!" groaned Harry. He took the cutting and read as
follows:--
THE MISSING IRONMASTER.
The Press Association states that nothing further has been
ascertained with regard to the whereabouts of Mr. Henry J.
Ringrose, the Westmoreland ironmaster, who was last seen on Easter
Eve. He has been traced, however, as already reported in these
columns, to the Café Suisse in Dieppe, though no further. The
people at the café persist in stating that their visitor only
remained a few hours, so that he would appear to have walked thence
into thin air. The police, as usual, are extremely reticent; but
inquiry at Scotland Yard has elicited the fact that considerable
doubt exists as to whether the missing man's chief creditors will,
or can, owing to the character of their claim, take further action
in the matter.
"Who are the chief creditors?" asked Harry, returning the cutting with
an ashy face.
"Four business friends of your father's, from whom I raised the money
in his name."
"Here in the neighbourhood?"
"No, in London; they advanced two thousand five hundred each."
"It was no good, you say?"
"No; the bank was not satisfied."
"So my father ran away with their money and left the works to go to
blazes--and my mother to starve?"
Lowndes shrugged his shoulders.
"I apologise again for insulting you, Mr. Lowndes," said the boy,
holding out his hand. "You have been a good friend to my poor father, I
can see, and I know that you firmly believe what you say. But I never
will! No; not if all his friends, and every newspaper in the kingdom,
told me it was true!"
"Then what are you to believe?"
"That there has been foul play!"
The elder man turned away with another shrug, and it was some moments
before Harry saw his face; when he did it was grave and sympathetic as
before, and exhibited no trace of the irritation which it had cost an
apparent effort to suppress.
"I am not surprised at that entering your head, Ringrose."
"Has it never entered yours?"
"Everything has; but one weeds out the impossibilities."
"Why is it impossible?" Harry burst out. "It is a good deal likelier
than that my father would have done what it's said he did! There's an
impossibility, if you like; and you would say so, too, if you had known
him better."
Mr. Lowndes shook his head, and smiled sadly as he watched the boy's
flaming face through his spectacles.
"You may have known your father, Ringrose, but you don't know human
nature, or you wouldn't talk like that. Nothing is impossible--no
crime--not even to the best of us--when the strain becomes more than we
can bear. It is a pure question of strain and strength: which is the
greater of the two. Every man has his breaking-point; your father was
at his for years; it's a mystery to me how he held out so long. You
must look at it sensibly, Ringrose. No thinking man will blame him, for
the simple reason that every man who thinks knows very well that he
might have done the same thing himself under the same pressure.
Besides--give him a chance! With ten thousand pounds in his pocket----"
"You're sure he had it in his pocket?" interrupted Harry. These
arguments only galled his wounds.
"Or else in a bag; it comes to the same thing."
"In what shape would he have the money?"
"Big notes and some gold."
"Yet foul play's an impossibility!"
"The numbers of the notes are known. Not one of them has turned up."
"I care nothing about that," cried the boy wildly, "though it shows he
hasn't spent them himself. Listen to me, Mr. Lowndes. I believe my
father is dead, I believe he has been murdered: and I would rather that
than what you say! But you claim to have been his friend? You raised
this money for him? Very well; take my hand--here in his room--where I
can see him now, all the time I'm talking to you--and swear that you
will help me to clear this mystery up! We'll inspan the best detective
in town, and take him with us to Dieppe, and never leave him till we
get at the truth. I mean to live for nothing else. Swear that you will
help me ... swear it here ... in his own room."
The wild voice had come down to a broken whisper. Next moment it had
risen again: the man hesitated.
"Swear it! Swear it! Or you may have been my father's friend, but you
are none from this hour to my mother and me."
Lowndes spread his hands in an indulgent gesture.
"Very well! I swear to help you to clear up this--mystery--as long as
you think it is one."
"That is all I want. Now tell me when the next train starts for town.
It used to be nine-twenty?"
"It is still."
"You are returning to London yourself?"
"Yes, by that train."
"Then let us meet at the station. It is now eight. I--I want to be
alone here for an hour or two. No, it will do me good, it will calm me.
I feel I have been very rude to you, sir, but I have hardly known what
I said. I am beside myself--beside myself!" And Harry Ringrose rushed
from the room, and up the bare and sounding stairs of his empty home:
it was from his own old bedroom that he heard Lowndes leave the house,
and saw a dejected figure climbing the sloping drive with heavy steps.
That hour of leave-taking is not to be described. How the boy harrowed
himself wilfully by going into every room and thinking of something
that had happened there, and seeing it all again through scalding
tears, is a thing to be understood by some, but pitied rather than
commended. There was, however, another and a sounder side to Harry
Ringrose, and the prayers he prayed, and the vows he vowed, these were
brave, and he meant them all that bitter birthday morning, that was to
have been the happiest of all his life. Then his heart was broken but
still heroic: there came many a brighter day he would gladly have
exchanged for that black one, for the sake of its high resolves, its
pure impulses, its noble and undaunted aspirations.
He had one more rencontre before he got away: in the garden he espied
their old gardener. It was impossible not to go up and speak to him;
and Harry left the old man crying like a child; but he himself had no
tears.
"I am glad they left you your job: you will care for things," he had
said, as he was going.
"Ay, ay, for the master's sake: he was the best master a man ever had,
say what they will."
"But you don't believe what they say?"
The gardener looked blank.
"Do you dare to tell me," cried Harry, "that you believe what they
believe?"
It was at this the man broke down; but Harry strode away with bitter
resentment in his heart, and so back to the town, with a defiant face
for every passer; but this time there were none he knew. At the spot
where his old companion had cut him, that affront was recalled for the
first time; its meaning was plain enough now; and plain the strange
conduct of the railway-porter, who kept out of his way when Harry
reappeared at the station.
Lowndes was there waiting for him, and had not only taken the tickets,
but also telegraphed to Mrs. Ringrose; and this moved poor Harry to a
shame-faced confession of his improvidence on the way down, and its
awful results, in the midst of which the other burst out laughing in
his face. Harry was a boy after his own heart; it was a treat to meet
anybody who declined to count the odds in the day of battle; but, in
any case, Mr. Lowndes claimed the rest of the day as "his funeral." As
Harry listened, and thanked his new friend, he had a keen and hostile
eye for any old ones; but the train left without his seeing another.
"The works look the same as ever," groaned Harry, as he gazed out on
them once more. "I thought they seemed to be doing so splendidly, with
all four furnaces in blast."
"They are doing better than for some years past: iron's looking up: the
creditors may get their money back yet."
"Thank God for that!"
Lowndes opened his eyes, and the sharp nose twitched amusement.
"If I were in your place that would be the worst part of all. I have no
sympathy with creditors as a class."
"I want to be even with them," said Harry through his teeth. "I will
be, too, before I die: with every man of them. Hallo! why, this is a
first-class carriage! How does that happen? I never looked where we got
in; I followed you."
"And I chose that we should travel first."
"But I can't, I won't!" cried Harry, excitedly. "It was monstrous of me
last night, but it would be criminal this morning. You sit where you
are. I can change into a third at the next station."
"I have a first-class ticket for you," rejoined Lowndes. "You may as
well make use of it."
"But when shall I pay you back?"
"Never, my boy! I tell you this is my funeral till I deliver you over
to your mother, so don't _you_ begin counting the odds; you've nothing
to do with them. Besides, you came up like a rocket, and I won't have
you go down altogether like the stick!"
Nor did he; and Harry soon saw that his companion was not to be judged
by his shabby top-hat and his shiny frock-coat; he was evidently a very
rich man. Where the boy had flung half-crowns overnight--where
half-a-crown was more than ample--his elder now scattered
half-sovereigns, and they had an engaged carriage the whole way. At
Preston an extravagant luncheon-basket was taken in, with a bottle of
champagne and some of the best obtainable cigars, for the quality of
both of which Gordon Lowndes made profuse apologies. But Harry felt a
new being after his meal, for grief and excitement had been his bread
all day, and the wine warmed his heart to the strange man with whom he
had been thrown in such dramatic contact. Better company, in happier
circumstances, it would have been difficult to imagine; and it was
clear that, with quip and anecdote, he was doing his utmost to amuse
Harry and to take him out of his trouble. But to no purpose: the boy
was perforce a bad listener, and at last confessed it in as many words.
"My mind is so full of my father," added Harry, "that I have hardly
given my dear mother a thought; but my life is hers from to-day. You
said she was in Kensington; in lodgings, I suppose?"
"No, in a flat. It's very small, but there's a room for you, and it's
been ready for weeks."
"What is she living on?"
"Less than half her private income by marriage settlement; that was all
there was left, and five-eighths of it she would insist on making over
to the men who advanced the ten thousand. She is paying them
two-and-a-half per cent. on their money and attempting to live on a
hundred and fifty a year!"
"I'll double it before long!"
"Then she'll pay them five."
"They shall have every farthing one day; and the other creditors, they
shall have their twenty shillings in the pound if I live long enough.
Now let me have the rest of those cuttings. I want to know just how we
stand--and what they say."
Out came the pocket-book once more. They were an hour's run nearer town
when Harry spoke again.
"May I keep them?" he said.
"Surely."
"Thank you. I take it the bank's all right--and thank God the other
liabilities up there are not large. As to the flight with that ten
thousand--I don't believe it yet. There has been foul play. You mark my
words."
Lowndes looked out at the flying fields.
"Which of you saw him last?" continued Harry.
"Your mother, when he left for town."
"When was that?"
"The morning after Good Friday."
"When did he cross?"
"That night."
"Did he write to anybody?"
"Not that I know of."
"Not to my mother?"
Lowndes leant forward across the compartment: there was a shrewd look
in the spectacled eyes.
"Not that I know of," he said again, but with a different intonation.
"I have often wondered!"
"Did you ask her?"
"Yes; she said not."
"Then what do you mean?" cried Harry indignantly. "Do you think my
mother would tell you a lie?"
"Your mother is the most loyal little woman in England," was the reply.
"I certainly think that she would keep her end up in the day of
battle."
Harry ground his teeth. He could have struck the florid able face whose
every look showed a calm assumption of his father's infamy.
"You take it all for granted!" he fumed; "you, who say you were his
friend. How am I to believe in such friendship? True friends are not so
ready to believe the worst. Oh! it makes my blood boil to hear you
talk; it makes me hate myself for accepting kindness at your hands. You
have been very kind, I know," added Harry in a breaking voice;
"but--but for God's sake don't let us speak about it any more!" And he
flung up a newspaper to hide his quivering lips; for now he was hoping
against hope and believing against belief.
Was it not in black and white in all the papers? How could it be
otherwise than true? Rightly or wrongly, the world had found his father
guilty; and was he to insult all and sundry who failed to repudiate the
verdict of the world?
Harry was one who could not endure to be in the wrong with anybody: his
weakness in every quarrel was an incongruous hankering for the good
opinion of the enemy, and this was intensified in the case of one who
was obviously anxious to be his friend. To appear ungracious or
ungrateful was equally repugnant to Harry Ringrose, and no sooner was
he master of his emotion than he lowered the paper in order to add a
few words which should remove any such impression.
Gordon Lowndes sat dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief that he
made haste to put away, as though it was his eyes he had been wiping,
which indeed was Harry's first belief. But the gold-rimmed glasses were
not displaced, and, so far from a tear, there was an expression behind
them for which Harry could not then find the name; nevertheless, it
made him hold his tongue after all.
CHAPTER IV.
THE NEW HOME.
Harry had hoped that his companion would go his own way when they got
to London; but it was "his funeral," as Mr. Lowndes kept saying, and he
seemed determined to conduct it to the end. Euston was crowded, where
Lowndes behaved like a man in his element, dealing abuse and largesse
with equal energy and freedom, and getting Harry and all his boxes off
in the first cab which left the station. But he himself was at Harry's
side; and there he sat until the cab stopped, half-an-hour later,
beneath a many-windowed red-brick pile thrown up in the angle of two
back streets.
A porter in uniform ran up to help with the luggage, and, as Harry
jumped out, a voice with a glad sob in it hailed him from a first-floor
window. He waved his hat, and, with a pang, saw a white head vanishing:
it had not been white when he went away. Next moment he was flying up
the stone stairs three at a time; and on the first landing, at an open
door, there was the sweet face, all aged and lined and lighted with
sorrow and shame and love; there were the softest arms in all the
world, spread wide to catch and clasp him to the warmest heart.
It was a long time afterwards, in a room which made the old furniture
look very big, the old pictures very sad, that Mr. Lowndes was
remembered for the first time. They looked into the narrow passage: the
boxes blocked it, but he was not there; they called, but there was no
answer.
"Have we no servant, mother?"
"We have no room for one. The porter's wife comes up and helps me."
"I can help you! Many a meal have I cooked in Africa."
"My boy, what a home-coming!"
It was the first word about that, and with it came the first catch in
Harry's mother's voice.
"No, mother, thank God I am back to take care of you; and oh! I am so
thankful we are to be alone to-night."
"But I am sorry he did not come in."
"He was quite right not to."
"But he must have paid for the cab--I will look out of the window--yes,
it has gone--and I had the money ready in case you forgot!"
Harry could have beaten himself, but he could not tell his mother just
then that he had arrived without a penny, and that Lowndes had not only
paid the cabman, but must be pounds out of pocket by him on the day.
"Don't you like him, dear?" said his mother, divining that he did not.
"I do and I don't," said Harry bluntly.
"He has been so kind to me!"
"Yes; he is kind enough."
"Did you not think it good of him to rush from Scotland to meet you and
then bring you all the way to your--new--home?"
"It was almost too good. I would have been happier alone," said Harry,
forgetting all else in his bitter remembrance of some speeches Lowndes
had made.
"That is not very grateful, my boy. You little know what he has been to
me!"
"Has he done so much?"
"Everything--all through! You see what I have saved from the wreck? It
was he who went to bid for me at the sale!"
"You bought them in, mother?"
"Yes; I could accept nothing from the creditors. That is the one point
on which I quarrel with Mr. Lowndes; but we have agreed to differ. Why
do you dislike him, Harry?"
"Mother, don't you know?"
"I cannot imagine."
"He thinks the worst--about my father."
It was the first mention of the father's name. Mrs. Ringrose was silent
for many moments.
"I know he does," she said at length.
"Then how can you bear the sight of him?" her boy burst out.
"It is no worse than all the world thinks."
And Mrs. Ringrose sighed; but now her voice was abnormally calm, as
with a grief too great for tears.
The long May evening had not yet closed in, and in the ensuing silence
the cries of children in the street below, and the Last Waltz of Weber
from the piano of the flat above, came with equal impertinence through
the open windows. Mrs. Ringrose was in the rocking-chair in which she
had nursed her only child. Her back was to the light, but she was
rocking slowly. Her son stood over her with horror deepening in his
face, but hers he could not see, only the white head which two years
ago had been hardly grey. He dropped upon his knees and seized her
hands; they were cold; and he missed her rings.
"Mother--mother! You don't think it too?"
No answer.
"You do! Oh, mother, how are we to go on living after this? What makes
you think it? Quick! has he written to you?"
Mrs. Ringrose started violently. "Who put that into your head?" she
cried out sharply.
"Nobody. I only wondered if there had been a letter, and I asked
Lowndes, but he said you said there had not."
"Was that not enough for you?"
"Oh, mother, tell me the truth!"
The poor lady groaned aloud.
"God knows I meant to keep it to myself!" she whispered. "And yet--oh,
how could I destroy his letter? And I thought you ought to see it--some
day--not yet."
"Mother, I must see it now."
"You will never breathe it to a soul?"
"Never without your permission."
"No one must ever dream I heard one word after he left me!"
"No one ever shall."
"I will get the letter."
His hand was trembling when he took it from her.
"It was written on the steamer, you see."
"It may be a forgery," said Harry, in a loud voice that trembled too.
Yet there was a ring of real hope in it. He was thinking of Lowndes in
the train. He had caught him mopping a wet brow. He had surprised a
guilty look--yes, guilty was the word--he had found it at last--in
those shifty eyes behind the _pince-nez_. If villainy should be at the
bottom of it all, and Lowndes at the bottom of the villainy!
If the letter should prove a forgery after all!
He had it in his hand. He carried it to the failing light. He hardly
dared to look at it, but when he did a cry escaped him.
It was a cry of disappointment and abandoned hope.
Minutes passed without another sound; then the letter was slowly folded
up and restored to its envelope, and dropped into Harry's pocket,
before his arms went round his mother's neck.
"Mother, let me burn it, so that no eyes but ours shall ever see!"
"Burn it? Burn the last letter I may ever have from him? Give it to
me!" And she pressed it to her bosom.
Harry hung his head in a long and wretched silence.
"We must forget him, mother," he said at last.
"Harry, he was a good father to you, he loved you dearly. He was mad
when he did what he has done. You must never say that again."
"I meant we must forget what he has done----"
"Ah God! if I could!"
"And only think of him as he used to be."
"Yes; yes; we will try."
"It would be easier--don't you think--if we never spoke of this?"
"We never will, unless we must."
"Let us think that we just failed like other people. But, mother, I
will work all my life to pay off everybody! I will work for you till I
drop. Goodness knows what at; but I learnt to work for fun in Africa, I
am ready to work in earnest, and, thank God, I have all my life before
me."
"You are twenty-one to-day!"
"Yes, I start fair in every way."
"That this should be your twenty-first birthday! My boy--my boy!"
* * * * *
The long May twilight deepens into night; the many windows of the
red-brick block are lit up one by one; and the many lives go on. Below,
at the curb, a doctor's brougham and a hansom are waiting end to end;
and from that top flat a young couple come scuttling down the stone
stairs, he in a crush-hat, she with a flower in her hair, and theirs is
the hansom. The flat below has similar tenants, but here the doctor is,
and the young man paces his desolate parlour with a ghastly face.
And in the flat below that it is Weber's Last Waltz once more, and
nothing else, by the hour together. And in the flat below that--the
flat that would have gone into one room of their old home--Harry
Ringrose and his mother are still steeling themselves and one another
to face the future and to live down the past.
The light has been lowered in their front room and transferred for a
space to the tiny dining-room at the back, which looks down into the
building's well, but now it is the front windows which stand out once
more. Twelve o'clock comes, and there is a tinkle of homing hansoms
(the brougham has gone away masterless), and the public-house at the
corner empties noisily, but the light in those front windows remains
the brightest in the mansions. And Weber is done with at last; but the
two voices below go on and on and on into the night; nor do they cease
when their light shifts yet again into the front bedroom.
It is two in the morning, and the young couple have come home crumpled
from their dance, and their feet drag dreadfully on the stairs, and the
doctor has taken their hansom, and the young man below them is drunk
with joy, when Harry Ringrose kisses his mother for the twentieth last
time and really goes. But he is too excited to sleep. In half-an-hour
he creeps back into the passage. Her light is still burning. He goes
in.
"You spoke of Innes, mother?"
"Yes; I feel sure he would be the first to help you."
"I cannot go to him. I can go to nobody. We must start afresh with
fresh friends, and I'll begin answering advertisements to-morrow.
Yet--Innes has helped me already!"
Mrs. Ringrose has been reading herself asleep, like a practical woman,
out of one of the new magazines he has brought home. The sweet face on
the pillow is wonderfully calm (for it is not from his mother that
Harry inherits his excitability), but at this it looks puzzled.
"When has he helped you?"
"To-night, mother! There was a motto he had when I was at his school.
He used to say it in his sermons, and he taught me to say it in my
heart."
"Well, my boy?"
"It came back to me just now. It puts all that we have been saying in a
nutshell. May I tell you, mother?"
"I am waiting to hear."
"'Money lost--little lost.'"
"It's easy to say that."
"'Honour lost--much lost.'"
"I call it everything."
"No, mother, wait! 'PLUCK lost--ALL lost!' It's only pluck that's
everything. We must never lose that, mother, we must never lose that!"
"God grant we never may."
CHAPTER V.
A WET BLANKET.
The morning sun filled the front rooms of the flat, and the heavy
hearts within were the lighter for its cheery rays. Sorrow may outlive
the night, and small joy come in the morning; but yet, if you are young
and sanguine, and the month be May, and the heavens unspotted, and the
air nectar, then you may suddenly find yourself thrilling with an
unwarrantable delight in mere life, and that in the very midst of
life's miseries. It was so with young Harry Ringrose, on the morning
following his tragic home-coming; it was even so with Harry's mother,
who was as young at heart as her boy, and fully as sanguine in
temperament. They had come down from the high ground of the night. The
everyday mood had supervened. Harry was unpacking his ostrich eggs in
the narrow passage, and thoroughly enjoying a pipe; in her own room his
mother sat cleaning her silver, incredible contentment in her face,
because her boy was in and out all the morning, and the little flat was
going to bring them so close together.
"That's the lot," said Harry when the bed was covered with the eggs.
"Now, mother, which do you think the best pair?"
"They all look the same to me."
"They are not. Look at this pair in my hands. Can't you see that
they're much bigger and finer than the rest?"
"I daresay they are."
"They're for you, mother, these two."
And he set them on the table among the spoons and forks and
plate-powder. She kissed him, but looked puzzled.
"What shall you do with the rest?"
"Sell them! Five shillings a pair; five tens are fifty; that's
two-pound-ten straight away."
"I won't have you sell them!"
"They are mine, mother, and I must."
"You'll be sorry for it when you have a good situation."
"Ah, when!" said Harry, and he was out again with a laugh.
A noise of breaking wood came from the passage. He was opening another
case. His mother frowned at her miniature in the spoon she had in hand,
and when he returned, brandishing a brace of Kaffir battle-axes, she
would hardly look at them.
"I feel sure Wintour Phipps would take you into his office," said Mrs.
Ringrose.
"I never heard of him. Who is he?"
"A solicitor; your father paid for his stamps when he was articled."
"An old friend, then?"
"Not of mine, for I never saw him; but he was your father's godson."
"It comes to the same thing, and I can't go to him, mother. Face old
friends I cannot! You and I are starting afresh, dear; I'm prepared to
answer every advertisement in the papers, and to take any work I can
get, but not to go begging favours of people who would probably cut us
in the street. I don't expect to get a billet instantly; that's why I
mean to sell all this truck--for the benefit of the firm."
"You had much better write an article about your experiences, and get
it into some magazine, as you said you would last night."
Indeed, they had discussed every possible career in the night, among
others that of literature, which the mother deemed her son competent to
follow on the strength of certain contributions to his school magazine,
and of the winning parody in some prize competition of ancient history.
He now said he would try his hand on the article some day, but it would
take time, and would anybody accept it when written? That was the
question, said Harry, and his mother had a characteristic answer.
"If you wrote to the Editor of _Uncle Tom's Magazine_," said she, "and
told him you had taken it in as long as you could remember--I bought in
the bound volumes for you, my boy--I feel sure that he would accept it
and pay for it too."
"Well, we'll see," said Harry, with a laugh. "Meanwhile we must find
somebody to accept all these curios, and to pay for them. I see no room
for them here."
"There is certainly very little."
"I wonder who would be the best people to go to?"
Mrs. Ringrose considered.
"I should try Whitbreds," said she at last, "since you are so set upon
it. They sell everything; and I have had all my groceries from them for
so many years that they can hardly refuse to take something from us."
To the simple-hearted lady, whom fifty years had failed to
sophisticate, there seemed nothing unreasonable in the expectations
which she formed of others, for they were one and all founded upon the
almost fanatical loyalty which was a guiding impulse of her own warm
heart. In her years of plenty it was ever the humblest friend who won
her warmest welcome, and the lean years to come proved powerless to
check this generous spirit. Mrs. Ringrose would be illogically staunch
to tradesmen whom she had dealt with formerly, and would delight their
messengers with unnecessary gratuities because she had been accustomed
to give all her life; but so unconscious was she of undue liberality on
her part that she was apt to credit others with her own extravagance in
charity, and to feel it bitterly when not done by as perhaps she alone
would have done. It simply astounded her when three of her husband's
old friends, who had in no way suffered by him, successively refused
her secret supplication for a desk for her boy in their offices: she
would herself have slept on the floor to have given the child of any
one of them a bed in her little flat.
But the treadmill round in search of work was not yet begun, though
Harry was soon enough to find himself upon the wheel. Even as he
unpacked his native weapons a weighty step was ascending the common
stair, and the electric bell rang long and aggressively just as Mrs.
Ringrose decided that it would be worth her son's while to let his
trophies go for fifty pounds.
"A tall man in a topper!" whispered Harry, bursting quietly in. "I saw
him through the ground glass; who can it be?"
"Your Uncle Spencer," said Mrs. Ringrose, looking straight at Harry
over the wash-leather and the mustard-pot.
"Uncle Spencer!" Harry looked aghast. "What's bringing him, mother?"
"I wrote to him directly I got the telegram."
"You never said so!"
"No; I knew you wouldn't be pleased."
"Need I see him?"
"It is you he has come to see. Go, my boy; take him into the
sitting-room, and I will join you when you have had your talk.
Meanwhile, remember that he is your mother's brother, and will exert
his influence to get you a situation; he has come so promptly, I
shouldn't be surprised if he has got you one already! And you are
letting him ring twice!"
Indeed, the avuncular thumb had already pressed the button longer than
was either necessary or polite, and Harry went to the door with
feelings which he had difficulty in concealing as he threw it open.
Uncle Spencer stood without in a stiff attitude and in sombre clerical
attire; he beheld his nephew without the glimmer of a smile on his
funereal, bearded countenance, while his large hand was slow in joining
Harry's, and its pressure perfunctory.
"So sorry to keep you waiting, but--but I forgot we hadn't a servant,"
fibbed Harry to be polite. "Do come in, Uncle Spencer."
"I thought nobody could be at home," was the one remark with which the
clergyman entered; and Harry sighed as he heard that depressing voice
again.
The Reverend Spencer Walthew was indeed the survival of a type of
divine now rare in the land, but not by any means yet extinct. His
waistcoat fastened behind his back in some mysterious manner, and he
never smiled. He was the vicar of a semi-fashionable parish in North
London, where, however, he preached in a black gown to empty pews,
while a mixed choir behaved abominably behind his back. As a man he was
neither fool nor hypocrite, but the natural enemy of pleasure and
enthusiasm, and one who took a grim though unconscious satisfaction in
disheartening his neighbour. No two proverbial opposites afford a more
complete contrast than was presented by Mr. Walthew and Mrs. Ringrose;
and yet at the bottom of the brother's austerity there lay one or two
of the sister's qualities, for those who cared to dig deep enough in
such stony and forbidding ground.
Harry had never taken to his uncle, who had frowned on Lord's and
tabooed the theatre on the one occasion of his spending a part of his
holidays in North London; and Mr. Walthew was certainly the last person
he wanted to see that day. It made Harry Ringrose throb and tingle to
look on the clergyman and to think of his father; they had never been
friendly together; and if one syllable was said against the man who was
down--no matter what he had done--the son of that man was prepared to
make such a scene as should secure an immunity from further insult. But
here Harry was indulging in fears as unworthy as his determination, and
he was afterwards ashamed of both.
The clergyman began in an inevitable strain, dwelling solemnly on the
blessing of adversity in general, before proceeding to point out that
the particular misfortunes which had overwhelmed Harry and his mother
could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be regarded as
adventitious or accidental, since they were obviously the deliberate
punishment of a justly irate God, and as such to be borne with
patience, meekness, and humility. Harry chafed visibly, thinking of his
innocent mother in the next room; but, to do the preacher justice, his
sermon was a short one, and the practical issue was soon receiving the
attention it deserved.
"I understand, Henry," said Mr. Walthew, "that you did obtain some
useful and remunerative employment in Africa, which you threw up in
order to come home and enjoy yourself. It is, of course, a great pity
that you were so ill-advised and improvident; but may I ask in what
capacity you were employed, and at what salary?"
"I don't admit that I was either ill-advised or improvident," cried
Harry, with disrespectful warmth. "I didn't go out to work, but for my
health, and I only worked for the fun of it, and am jolly glad I did
come back to take care of my mother and to work for her. I was tutor in
a Portuguese planter's family, and he gave me seventy pounds a year."
"And your board?"
"And my board."
"It was very good. It is a great deal better than anything you are
likely to get here. How long were you with the planter?"
"Ten months."
"Only ten months! You must allow an older head than yours to continue
thinking it is a pity you are not there still. Now, as to money
matters, your father would doubtless cease sending you remittances once
you were earning money for yourself?"
"No, he sent me fifty pounds last Christmas."
"Then, at any rate, you have brought enough home to prevent your being
a burden to your mother? Between fifty and a hundred pounds, I take
it?"
Harry shook his head; it was hot with a shame he would have owned to
anybody in the world but Mr. Walthew.
"Not fifty pounds?"
"No."
"How much, then?"
"Not a penny!"
The clergyman opened his eyes and lifted his hands in unaffected
horror. Harry could not help smiling in his face--could not have helped
it if he had stood convicted of a worse crime than extravagance.
"You have spent every penny--and you smile!" the uncle cried. "You come
home to find your mother at starvation's door--and you smile! You have
spent her substance in--in----"
"Riot!" suggested Harry wickedly. "Sheer riot and evil living! Oh,
Uncle Spencer, don't look like that; it's not exactly true; but, can't
you see, I had no idea what was going to happen here at home? I thought
I was coming back to live on the fat of the land, and when I'd made my
miserable pile I spent it--like a man, I thought--like a criminal, if
you will. Whichever it was, you must know which I feel now. And
whatever I have done I am pretty badly punished. But at least I mean to
take my punishment like a man, and to work like one, too, at any mortal
thing I can find to do."
Mr. Walthew looked down his nose at the carpet on which he stood. He
had sense enough to see that the lad was in earnest now, and that it
was of no use to reproach him further with what was past.
"It seems to me, Henry," he said at length, "that it's a case of
ability rather than of will. You say you are ready to do anything; the
question is--what can you do?"
"Not many things," confessed Henry, in a humbler voice; "but I can
learn, Uncle Spencer--I will do my best to learn."
"How old are you, Henry?"
"Twenty-one."
Harry was about to add "yesterday," but refrained from making his
statement of fact an appeal for sympathy; for the man in him was coming
steadily to the front.
"Then you would leave school in the Sixth Form?"
Harry had to shake his head.
"Perhaps you were on the Modern Side? All the better if you were!"
"No, I was not; I left in the form below the Sixth."
"Then you know nothing about book-keeping, for example?"
"I wish I did."
"But you are a fair mathematician?"
"It was my weakest point."
The clergyman's expression was more melancholy than ever. "It is a
great pity--a very great pity, indeed," said he. "However, I see
writing materials on the table, and shall be glad if you will write me
down your full name, age, and address."
Harry sat down and wrote what was required of him in the pretty, rather
scholarly hand which looked like and was the imitation of a prettier
and more scholarly one. Then he unsuspectingly blotted the sheet and
handed it to Mr. Walthew, who instantly began shaking his head in the
most depressing fashion.
"It is as I feared," said he; "you do not even write a fair commercial
hand. It is well enough at a distance," and he held the sheet at arm's
length, "but it is not too easy to read, and I fear it would never do
in an office. There are several City men among my parishioners; I had
hoped to go to one or two of them with a different tale, but now I
fear--I greatly fear. However, one can but try. You do not fancy any of
the professions, I suppose? Not that you could afford one if you did."
"Are the fees so high?" asked poor Harry, in a broken-spirited voice.
"High enough to be prohibitive in your case, though it might not be so
if you had saved your money," the clergyman took care to add. "Of which
particular profession were you thinking?"
"We--we have been talking it all over, and we did speak of--the Law."
"Out of the question; it would cost hundreds, and you wouldn't make a
penny for years."
"Then there is--schoolmastering."
"It leads to nothing; besides--excuse me, Henry--but do you think you
are scholar enough yourself to--to presume to--teach others?"
Harry fetched a groan.
"I don't know. I managed well enough in Mozambique, but it was chiefly
teaching English. I only know that I would work day and night to
improve myself, if once I could get a chance."
"Well," said Uncle Spencer, "it is just possible that I may hear in my
parish of some delicate or backward boy whom you would be competent to
ground, and if so I shall recommend you as far as I conscientiously
can. But I cannot say I am sanguine, Henry; it would be a different
thing if you had worked harder at school and got into the Sixth Form. I
suppose no other career has occurred to you as feasible? I confess I
find the range sadly restricted by the rather discreditable limitations
to which you own."
Another career had occurred to Harry, and it was the one to which he
felt most drawn, but by inclination rather than by conscious aptitude,
so that he would have said nothing about it had not Mrs. Ringrose
joined them at this moment. Her brother greeted her with a tepid
salute, then dryly indicated the drift of the conversation, enlarging
upon the vista of hopeless disability which it had revealed in Henry,
and concluding with a repetition of his last question.
"No," said Harry rather sullenly, "I can think of nothing else I'm fit
for unless I sweep a crossing; and then you would say I hadn't money
for the broom!"
"But, surely, my boy," cried his mother, "you have forgotten what you
said to me last night?"
Harry frowned and glared, for it is one thing to breathe your
ridiculous aspirations to the dearest of mothers in the dead of night,
and quite another thing to confide them to a singularly unsympathetic
uncle in broad daylight. But Mrs. Ringrose had turned to her brother,
and she would go on: "There is one thing he tells me he would rather do
than anything else in the world--and I am sure he could do it best."
"What is that?"
"Write!"
Harry groaned. Mr. Walthew raised his eyebrows. Mrs. Ringrose sat
triumphant.
"Write what, my dear Mary?"
"Articles--poems--books."
A grim resignation was given to Harry, and he laughed aloud as the
clergyman shrugged his shoulders and shook his head.
"On his own showing," said Uncle Spencer, "I should doubt whether he
has--er--the education--for that."
Mrs. Ringrose looked displeased, and even dangerous, for the moment;
but she controlled her feelings on perceiving that the boy himself was
now genuinely amused.
"You are quite mistaken," she contented herself with saying. "Have I
never shown you the parody on Gray's Elegy he won a guinea for when he
was fourteen? Then I will now."
And the fond lady was on her feet, only to find her boy with his back
to the door, and laughter, shame and anger fighting for his face.
"You shall do no such thing, mother," Harry said firmly. "That
miserable parody!"
"It was nothing of the kind. It began, 'The schoolbell tolls the
knell----'"
"Hush, mother!"
"'Of parting play'" she added wilfully.
Mr. Walthew's eyebrows had reached their apogee.
"That is quite enough, Mary," said he. "I disapprove of parodies, root
and branch; they are invariably vulgar; and when the poem parodied has
a distinctly religious tendency, as in this case, they are also
irreverent and profane. I am only glad to see that Henry is himself
ashamed of his lucubration. If he should write aught of a religious
character, and get it into print--a difficult matter, Henry, for one so
indifferently equipped--my satisfaction will not be lessened by my
surprise. Meanwhile let him return to those classics he should never
have neglected, for by the dead languages only can we hope to obtain a
mastery of our own; and I, for my part, will do my best in what, after
all, I regard as a much less hopeless direction. Good-bye, Mary. I
trust that I shall see you both on Sunday."
But Mrs. Ringrose would not let him go without another word for her
boy's parody.
"When I read it to Mr. Lowndes," said she, to Harry's horror, "he said
that he thought that a lad who could write so well at fourteen should
have a future before him. So you see everybody is not of your opinion,
Spencer; and Mr. Lowndes saw nothing vulgar."
"Do I understand you to refer," said Mr. Walthew, bristling, "to the
person who has done me the honour of calling upon me in connection with
your affairs?"
"He is the only Mr. Lowndes I know."
"Then let me tell you, Mary, that his is not a name to conjure with in
my hearing. I should say, however, that he is the last person to be a
competent judge of vulgarity or--or other matters."
"Then you dislike him too?" cried poor Mrs. Ringrose.
"Do you?" said Mr. Walthew, turning to Harry; and uncle and nephew
regarded one another for the first time with mutually interested eyes.
"Not I," said Harry stoutly. "He has been my mother's best friend."
"I am sorry to hear it," the clergyman said; "what's more, I don't
believe it."
"But he has been and he is," insisted the lady; "you little know what
he has done for me."
"I wouldn't trust his motives," said her brother. "I am sorry to say
it, Mary; he is very glib and plausible, I know; but--he doesn't strike
me as an honest man!"
Mrs. Ringrose was troubled and vexed, and took leave of the visitor
with a face as sombre as his own; but as for Harry, he recalled his own
feelings on the journey up, and he felt less out of sympathy with his
uncle than he had ever done in his life before. But Mr. Walthew was not
one to go without an irritating last word, and in the passage he had
his chance. He had remarked on the packing cases, and Harry had dived
into his mother's room and returned with an ostrich egg in each hand,
of which he begged his uncle's acceptance, saying that he would send
them by the parcels post. Mr. Walthew opened his eyes but shook his
head.
"I could not dream of taking them from you," said he, "in--in your
present circumstances, Henry."
"But I got them for nothing," said Harry, at once hurt and nettled. "I
got a dozen of them, and any amount of assegais and things, all for
love, when I was on the Zambesi. I should like you and my aunt to have
something."
"Really I could not think of it; but, if I did, I certainly should not
permit you to incur the expense of parcel postage."
"Pooh! uncle, it would only be sixpence or a shilling."
"_Only_ sixpence _or_ a shilling! As if they were one and the same
thing! You talk like a millionaire, Henry, and it pains me to hear you,
after the conversation we have had."
Harry wilfully observed that he never had been able to study the
shillings, and his uncle stood shocked on the threshold, as indeed he
was meant to be.
"Then it's about time," said he, "that you did learn to study them--and
the sixpences--and the pence. You were smoking a pipe when I came. I
confess I was surprised, not merely because the habit is a vile one,
for it is unhappily the rule rather than the exception, but because it
is also an extravagant habit. You may say--I have heard young men
say--that it only costs you a few pence a week. Then, pray, study those
few pence--and save them. It is your duty. And as for what you say you
got for nothing, the ostrich eggs and so forth, take them and sell them
at the nearest shop! That also is your bounden duty, unless you wish to
be a burden to your mother in her poverty; and I am very sorry that you
should compel me to tell you so by talking of not 'studying' the
shillings."
He towered in the doorway, a funereal monument of righteous horror; and
once more Harry held out his hand, and let his elder go with the last
word. The lad realised, in the first place, that he had just heard one
or two things which were perfectly true; and yet, in the second, he was
certain that he could not have replied without insolence--after his own
prior and virtuous resolve to sell the curios himself. Now he never
would sell them--so he felt for the moment; and he found himself
closing the door as though there were illness in the flat, in his
anxiety to keep from banging it as he desired.
"I fear your Uncle Spencer has been vexing you too," his mother said;
"and yet I know that he will do his best to secure you a post."
"Oh, that's all right, mother; he was kind enough; it's only his way,"
said Harry, for he could see that his mother was sufficiently put out
as it was.
"It's a way that makes me miserable," said poor Mrs. Ringrose, with a
tear in her voice. "Did you hear what he said to me? He said what I
never shall forgive."
"Not about those rotten verses?"
"No--about Mr. Lowndes. Your uncle said he didn't think him an honest
man."
CHAPTER VI.
THE GAME OF BLUFF.
An inscrutable note reached Harry by the last post that night. It was
from Gordon Lowndes, and it ran:--
"Leadenhall Street, E.C.
"May 20.
"DEAR RINGROSE,--If you are still of the same mind about a matter
which we need not name, let me hear from you by return, and I'll
'inspan' the best detective in the world. He is at present cooling
his heels at Scotland Yard, but may be on the job again any day, so
why not on ours?
"Perhaps you will kindly drop me a line in any case, as I await
your instructions.
"Yours faithfully,
"GORDON LOWNDES."
"What is it, my boy?"
"A line from Lowndes."
"Am I not to see it?"
"I would rather you didn't, mother dear."
"You haven't offended him, I hope?"
"Oh, no, it's about something we spoke of in the train; it has come to
nothing, that's all."
And Mrs. Ringrose gathered, as she was intended to gather, that some
iron or other had already been in the fire--and come out again. She
said no more. As for Harry, the final proof of his father's dishonour
had put out of his mind the oath which he had made Lowndes swear in
that almost happy hour when he could still refuse to believe; and the
sting of the reminder, and of the contrast between his feelings then
and now, was such that he was determined his mother should not bear it
with him. But yet, with all the pain it gave, the note from Lowndes
both puzzled and annoyed him; it was as though there were some subtle
thing between the lines, a something in a cipher to which he had not
the key; and he resented being forced to reply. After long
deliberation, however, this was written and rewritten, and taken
stealthily to the pillar in the small hours:--
"Kensington, May 21st.
"DEAR MR. LOWNDES,--I am not of the same mind about the matter
which you very kindly do not name. I hope that neither you nor I
will ever have occasion to name it again, and that you will forgive
me for what I said yesterday before I could believe the truth. I
hardly know now what I did say, but I do honestly apologise, and
only beg of you never to speak, and, if possible, not to think, of
it again.
"Believe me that I am grateful for your kind offer, and more than
grateful for all your goodness to my mother.
"Yours sincerely,
"HARRY RINGROSE."
This had the effect of bringing Lowndes to the flat the following
afternoon, in the high spirits which were characteristic of the normal
man; it was only natural they should have deserted him the day before;
and yet when Harry came in and found him taking tea with his mother,
radiant, voluble, hilarious, the change was such that he seemed to the
boy another being. Humour shone through the gold-rimmed glasses and
trembled at the tip of the pointed nose. Harry had never seen a jollier
face, or listened to so boisterous a laugh; and they were what he
needed, for he had come in doubly embittered and depressed.
He had been to the great house which had supplied his mother with her
groceries for so many years. He had seen a member of the firm, a
gentleman of presence and aplomb, in whose courtly company Harry and
his old clothes were painfully outclassed. The resultant and inevitable
repulse was none the less galling from being couched in terms of
perfectly polite condescension. Harry carried his specimen battle-axe
home in the brown paper he had taken it in, and pitched it upon the
sofa with a wry face before recounting his experience.
Lowndes instantly said that he would get a price for the curios if
Harry would send them along to his office. Whereupon Harry thanked him,
but still looked glum, for a worse experience remained untold.
The boy was in glaring need of new clothes; he could not possibly seek
work in town as he was; and Mrs. Ringrose had characteristically
insisted that he should go to his father's and his own old London
tailors. There was, moreover, some point in such a course, since it was
now known that Mr. Ringrose had settled his tailors' account, with
several others of the kind, on the very eve of his flight; so that in
the circumstances these people might fairly be expected to wait for
their money until Harry could earn it. Elsewhere he would have to pay
ready cash, a very serious matter, if not an impossibility for some
time to come. So Harry was really driven to go where he was known, but
yet so ashamed, that it was only the miserable interview with the
well-groomed gentleman aforesaid which had brought him to the point. He
had called at the tailors' on his way home, chosen his cloth and been
measured, only to be confronted by the senior partner at the door.
"What do you think he wanted?" cried Harry in a blaze. "A guarantee
that they would be paid! I told them they needn't trouble to make the
things at all, and out I came."
Lowndes dashed down his cup and was on his legs in an instant.
"I'll give them their guarantee," said he. "You swallow your tea and
get your hat; we'll take a hansom back to your tailors, and I'll give
them their guarantee!"
Harry was against any such intervention, but Mrs. Ringrose was against
Harry, and in less than five minutes Lowndes had carried him off. In
the hansom the spirits of that mirthful man rose higher than ever; he
sat rubbing his hands and chuckling with delight; but so truculent were
his sentiments that Harry, who hated a row as much as his companion
appeared to like one, was not a little nervous as to what would happen,
and got out finally with his heart in his mouth.
What did happen need not be described. Suffice it that Mr. Lowndes
talked to that master-tailor with extraordinary energy for the space of
about three minutes, and that in several different strains, preparing
his soil with simple reproaches, scarifying with sarcasm, and finally
trampling it down with a weight of well-worded abuse the like of which
Harry had never listened to off the stage. And the effect was more
extraordinary than the cause: the tradesman took it like a lamb,
apologised to Harry on the spot, and even solicited his friend's custom
as they turned to leave the shop. The result opened Harry's mouth in
sheer amazement. After a first curt refusal, Mr. Lowndes hesitated,
fingered a cloth, became gradually gracious, and in the end was
measured for no fewer than three suits and an Inverness cape.
"Couldn't resist it!" said he, roaring with laughter in the cab.
"Trustfulness is a virtue we should all encourage, and I hope,
Ringrose, that you'll continue to encourage it in these excellent
fellows. I've sown the seed, it's for you to reap the flower; and
recollect that they'll think much more of you when you order six suits
than when you pay for one."
"It was extraordinary," said Harry, "after the dressing-down you gave
them!"
"Dressing-down?" said Lowndes. "I meant to dress 'em down, and I'll
dress anybody down who needs it--of that you may be sure. What's this?
Grosvenor Square? Do you see that house with the yellow balcony in the
far corner? That's my Lady Banff's--I gave _her_ a bit of my mind the
other evening. Went to see my Lord on business. Left standing in the
hall twenty minutes. Down came my Lady to dinner, so I just asked her,
as a matter of curiosity, if they took me for a stick or an umbrella,
to leave me there, and then I told her what I thought of the manners
and customs of her house. My Lady had me shown into the library at
once, and made me a handsome apology into the bargain. I guarantee
friend Yellowplush to know better next time!"
Lowndes stayed to supper at the flat, and he became better and better
company as Harry Ringrose gradually yielded to the contagion of his
gaiety and his good-humour. He was certainly the most entertaining of
men; yet for a long time Harry resented being entertained by him, and
would frown one moment because he had been forced to laugh the moment
before. Nor was this because of anything that had already happened; it
was due entirely to the current behaviour of Gordon Lowndes. The man
took unwarrantable liberties. His status at the flat was rightly that
of a privileged friend, but Harry thought he presumed upon it
insufferably.
Like many great talkers, Lowndes was a vile listener, who thought
nothing of interrupting Mrs. Ringrose herself; while as for Harry, he
tried more than once to set some African experience of his own against
the visitor's endless anecdotes; but he never succeeded, and for a time
the failures rankled. It was the visitor, again, who must complain of
the supper: the lamb was underdone, the mint sauce too sweet for him,
and the salad dressing which was on the table not to be compared with
the oil and vinegar which were not. These were the things that made
Harry hate himself when he laughed; yet laugh he must; the other's
intentions were so obviously good; and he did not offend Mrs. Ringrose.
She encouraged him to monopolise the conversation, but that without
appearing to attach too much importance to everything he said. And once
when Harry caught her eye, himself raging inwardly, there was an
indulgent twinkle in it which mollified him wonderfully, for it seemed
to say: "These are his little peculiarities; you should not take them
seriously; they do not make him any the less my friend--and yours." It
was this glance which undermined Harry's hostility and prepared his
heart for eventual surrender to the spell of which Gordon Lowndes was
undoubted master.
"I tell you what, Ringrose," said he, as they rose from the table, "if
you don't get a billet within the next month, I'll give you one
myself."
"You won't!" cried Harry, incredulously enough, for the promise had
been made without preliminary, and it seemed too good to be possible.
"Won't I?" laughed Lowndes; "you'll see if I won't! What's more, it'll
be a billet worth half-a-dozen such as that uncle of yours is likely to
get you. What would you say to three hundred for a start?"
"I knew you were joking," was what Harry said, with a sigh; and his
mother turned away as though she had known it too.
"I was never more serious in my life," retorted Lowndes. "I'm up to my
chin in the biggest scheme of the century--bar none--though I'm not
entitled to tell you what it is at this stage. It's a critical stage,
Ringrose, but this week will settle things one way or the other. It's
simply a question whether the Earl of Banff will or whether the Earl of
Banff won't, and he's going to answer definitely this week. If he
will--and I haven't the slightest doubt of it in my own mind--the
Company will be out before you know where you are--and you shall be
Secretary----"
"Secretary!"
"Be good enough not to interrupt me, Ringrose. You shall be Secretary
with three hundred a year. Not competent? Nonsense; I'll undertake to
make you competent in a couple of hours; but if I say more, you'll know
too much before the time, and I'm pledged to secrecy till we land the
noble Earl. He's a pretty big fish, but I've as good as got him.
However, he's to let us know this week, and perhaps it would be as well
not to raise the wind on that three hundred meanwhile; but it's as good
as in your pocket, Ringrose, for all that!"
Mrs. Ringrose sat in her chair, without a sound save that of her
knitting needles; and Harry formed the impression that she was already
in the secret of the unmentionable scheme, but that she disapproved of
it. He remarked, however, that he only wished he had known of such a
prospect in time to have mentioned it to his uncle at their interview.
"Your uncle!" cried Lowndes. "I should like to have seen his face if
you had! I asked him to take shares the other day--told him I could put
him on the best thing of the reign--and it was as good as a pantomime
to see his face. Apart from his religious scruples, which make him
regard the City of London as the capital of a warmer place than
England, he's not what you would call one of Nature's sportsmen, that
holy uncle of yours. He's a gentleman who counts the odds. I wouldn't
trust him in the day of battle. Never till my dying day shall I forget
our first meeting!"
And Lowndes let out a roar of laughter that might have been heard
throughout the mansions; but Harry looked at his mother, who was
smiling over her knitting, before he allowed himself to smile and to
ask what had happened.
"Your mother had written to tell him I was going to call," said
Lowndes, wiping the tears from his eyes, "and when I did go he wanted
proof of my identity because I didn't happen to have a card on me. I
suppose he thought I looked a shady cuss, so he took it into his head I
wasn't the real Simon Pure. You see, there's nothing rash about your
uncle; as for me, I burst out laughing in his face, and that made
matters worse. He said he'd want a witness then--a witness to my
identity before he'd discuss his sister's affairs with me. 'All right,'
says I, 'you shall have half a dozen witnesses, for I'll call my
underclothes! There's "Gordon Lowndes" on my shirt and collar--there's
"Gordon Lowndes" on my pants and vest--and if there isn't "Gordon
Lowndes" on both my socks there'll be trouble when I get home,' I told
him; and I was out of my coat and waistcoat before he could stop me.
I'd have gone on, too, but that was enough for your uncle! I can see
him now--it was on his doorstep--but he let me in after that!"
Harry had a hearty, boyish laugh which it was a pleasure to hear, and
Mrs. Ringrose heard it now as she had not heard it for two years; for
she had shown that the story did not offend her by laughing herself;
and besides, the boy also could see his uncle, with sable arms
uplifted, and this impudent Bohemian coolly stripping on the doorstep.
His innate impudence was brought home to Harry in different fashion a
moment later, when the visitor suddenly complained of the light, and
asked why on earth there was only one gas-bracket in a room of that
size.
"Because I could not afford more," replied Mrs. Ringrose.
"Afford them, my dear madam? There should have been no question of
affording them!" cried Gordon Lowndes. "You should have brought what
you wanted from your own house."
"But it wasn't our own," sighed Mrs. Ringrose; "it belonged to--our
creditors."
"Your creditors!" echoed Lowndes, with scathing scorn. "It makes me
positively ill to hear an otherwise sensible lady speak of creditors in
that submissive tone! I regard it as a sacred obligation on all of us
to get to windward of our creditors, by fair means or foul. We owe it
to our fellow-creatures who may find themselves similarly situated
to-morrow or next day. If we don't get to windward of our creditors, be
very sure they'll get to windward of us. But to pamper and pet the
enemy--as though they'd dare to say a word about a petty
gas-bracket!--was a perfect crime, my dear Mrs. Ringrose, and one that
showed a most deplorable lack of public spirit. I only wish I'd thought
of your gas-brackets when I was down there the day before yesterday!"
"Why? What would you have done?" demanded Harry with some heat.
"Come away with one in my hat!" roared Lowndes. "Come away with the
chandelier next my skin!"
And he broke into a great guffaw in which Harry Ringrose joined in his
own despite. It was absurd to apply conventional standards to this
sworn enemy of convention. It was impossible to be angry with Gordon
Lowndes. Harry determined to take no further offence at anything he
might say or do, but to follow his mother's tacit example and to accept
her singular friend on her own tolerant terms. Nor was it hard to see
when the lad made amiable resolutions; they flew like flags upon his
face; and Mrs. Ringrose was able to go to bed and to leave the pair
together with an easy mind.
Whereupon they sat up till long after midnight, and Harry, having
relinquished all thought of entertaining Gordon Lowndes, was himself
undeniably entertained. He had seen something of the world (less than
he thought, but still something), yet he had never met with anybody
half so interesting as Lowndes, who had been everywhere, seen
everything, and done most things, in his time. He had made and lost a
fortune in different companies, the names of which Harry hardly caught,
for they set him speculating upon the new Company which was to make his
own small fortune too. Lowndes, however, refused to be drawn back to
that momentous subject. Nor were all the exploits he recounted of a
financial cast; there were some which Harry would have flatly
disbelieved the day before; but one and all were consistent with the
character of the man as he had seen it since.
Great names seemed as familiar to him as his own, and, after the scene
at the tailors', Harry could well believe that Mr. Lowndes had heckled
a very eminent politician to his inconvenience, if not to the alleged
extent of altering the entire course of a General Election. He was also
the very man to have defended in person an action for libel, and to
have lost it by the little error of requesting the judge to "be good
enough to hold his tongue." The consequences had been serious indeed,
but Lowndes described them with considerable relish. His frankness was
not the least of his charms as a raconteur. Before he went he had
confessed to one crime at least--that of blackmailing a surgeon-baronet
for a thousand pounds in his own consulting-room.
"He got a hold of the bell-rope," said Lowndes, "but it was no use his
playing the game of bluff with _me_. I simply laughed in his face. He'd
murdered a poor man's wife--vivisected her, Ringrose--taken her to
pieces like a watch--and he'd got to pay up or be exposed."
For it was disinterested blackmail, so that even this story was
characteristic if incredible. It illustrated what may be termed an
officious altruism--which Harry had seen operating in his own
behalf--side by side with a perfectly piratical want of principle which
Lowndes took no pains to conceal. It was impossible for an
impressionable young fellow, needing a friend, not to be struck by one
so bluff, so masterful, so kind-hearted, and probably much less
unscrupulous than it pleased him to appear; and it was impossible for
Harry Ringrose not to put the kind heart first, as he came upstairs
after seeing Lowndes into a hansom, and thought how joyfully he would
come up them if he were sure of earning even one hundred a year.
And Lowndes said three!
"I am thankful you like him," said Mrs. Ringrose, who was still awake.
"But--we all can see the faults of those we really like--and there's
one fault I do see in Mr. Lowndes. He is so sanguine!" Mrs. Ringrose
might have added that we see those faults the plainest when they are
also our own.
"Sanguine!" said Harry. "How?"
"He expects Lord Banff to make up his mind this week."
"Well?"
"It has been 'this week' all this year!"
Harry looked very sad.
"Then you don't think much of my chances of that--three hundred? I
might have seen you didn't at the time."
"No, my boy, I do not. Of his will to help you there can be no
question; his ability is another matter; and we must not rely on him."
"But you say he has helped you so much?"
"In a different way."
"Well," said Harry after a pause, "in spite of what you say, he seems
quite sure himself that everything will be settled to-morrow. He has an
appointment with Lord Banff in the afternoon. He wants to see me
afterwards, and has asked me to go down and spend the evening with them
at Richmond."
Mrs. Ringrose lay conspicuously silent.
"Who are 'they,' mother?" continued her son. "Somehow or other he is a
man you never associate with a family, he's so complete in himself. Is
he married?"
"His wife is dead."
"Then there are children?"
"One daughter, I believe."
"Don't you know her?"
"No; and I don't want to!" cried Mrs. Ringrose. So broke the small
storm which had been brewing in her grave face and altered voice.
"Why not, mother?"
"She has never been near me! Here I have been nearly two months, and
she has never called. I shall refuse to see her when she does. The
father can come, but we are beneath the daughter. We are in trouble,
you see! I only hope you'll have very little to say to her."
"I won't go at all if you'd rather I didn't."
"No, you must go; but be prepared for a snub--and to snub her!"
The bitterness of a sweet woman is always startling, and Harry had
never heard his mother speak so bitterly. Her spirit infected him, and
he left her with grim promises. Yet he went to bed more interested than
ever in Gordon Lowndes.
CHAPTER VII.
ON RICHMOND HILL.
It was the hour before sunset when Harry Ringrose took the train from
Earl's Court to Richmond, and, referring to an envelope which Lowndes
had given him overnight, inquired his way to Sandringham, Greville
Road, Richmond Hill. Having no experience of suburban London, he was
prepared to find a mansion not absolutely unworthy of its name, and was
rather astonished at having to give that of the road to the policeman
who directed him. He had half expected that officer to look impressed
and say, "Oh, yes, Mr. Lowndes's; the large house on the hill; you
can't mistake it." For though he gathered that Lowndes was only about
to become a millionaire, and that his contempt for creditors was
founded upon some former personal experience of that obnoxious class,
it nevertheless appeared to Harry that his friend must be pretty well
off as it was. At all events, he thought nothing of losing the last
train and driving all this way home.
Harry had never been in Richmond before, and the picturesque features
with which its narrow streets still abound were by no means lost upon
him. Here a quaint gable, and there a tile roof, sunken and discoloured
with sheer age, reminded him that he was indeed in the old country once
more; and he rejoiced in the fact with a blessed surcease of the pain
and shame with which his home-coming had been fraught. May was in his
blood; and as he climbed the hill the words of the old song, that
another Richmond claims, rang so loud in his head that he had a work to
keep them back from his lips:--
"On Richmond Hill there lives a lass, More bright than May-day morn;
Whose charms all other maids' surpass--A rose without a thorn. This
lass so neat, with smiles so sweet, Has won my right good will. I'd
crowns resign to call her mine, Sweet lass of Richmond Hill!"
The young fellow could not help thinking that it was a lass of Richmond
Hill he was about to meet, and wondering whether her smiles would prove
sweet, and her charms superior to those of all other maids. Harry
Ringrose had never been in love. He had been duly foolish in his callow
day, but that was nothing. From the firm pedestal of one-and-twenty he
could look back, and lay his hand upon his heart, and aver with truth
that it had never been irretrievably lost. Nevertheless, Harry was
quite prepared to lose his heart as soon as ever he realised the ideal
which was graven upon it; or he had been so prepared until the
revelation of these last days had hurled such idle aspirations to the
winds. But, for some reason, the memory of that revelation did not
haunt him this evening; and, accordingly, he was so prepared once more.
One of the many inconveniences of preconceiving your fate lies in the
nervous feeling that it may be lurking round every corner in the shape
of every woman you are about to meet. Even when he met them Harry was
not always sure. His ideal was apt to be elastic in the face of obvious
charms. It was only the impossibles that he knew at sight, such as the
girl who was climbing the hill ahead of him at this moment. Harry would
not have looked twice at her but for one circumstance.
She was tall and well-built, on a far larger scale than Harry cared
about, and yet she was continually changing a bag which she carried
from one hand to the other. It was a leather travelling-bag, of no
excessive size, but as she carried it in one hand her body bent itself
the other way; and she never had it in the same hand long.
The hill was steep and seemed interminable; it was the warm evening of
a hot day; and Harry, slowly overhauling the young woman, might have
seen that she had pretty hair and ears, but he could think of nothing
but her burden and her fatigue. He could not even think of himself and
his ideals, and had so ceased committing his besetting sin. What he did
see, however, was that the girl was a lady, and he heartily wished that
she were not. He longed to carry that bag for her, but he could not
bring himself to offer to do so. He had too much delicacy or too little
courage.
Irresolutely he slackened his pace; he was ashamed, despite his
scruples, to pass her callously without a word. He was close behind her
now. He heard her breathing heavily. Was there nothing he could say?
Was there no way of putting it without offence? Harry was still
thinking when the knot untied itself. The girl had stopped dead, and
put the bag down with a deep sigh, and Harry had caught it up without
thinking any more.
"What are you doing?" cried the girl. "Give that back to me at once."
Her voice was very indignant, but also a little faint; and the note of
alarm with which it began changed to one of authority as she saw that,
at any rate, she was not dealing with a thief.
"I beg your pardon," said Harry, very red, as he raised his hat with
his unoccupied hand; "but--but you really must let me carry it a little
way for you."
"I could not dream of it. Will you kindly give it me back this
instant?"
The girl was now good-humoured but very firm. She also had coloured,
but her lips remained pale with fatigue. And she had very fine,
fearless, grey eyes; but Harry found he could defy them in such a
cause, so that they flashed with anger, and a foot--no very small
one--stamped heartily on the pavement.
"Did you hear what I said?"
"I did; but----"
"Give it to me!"
"It's so heavy."
"Give it to me!"
He was wondering whether the bag was full of jewels, that she was in
such a state about it, when all at once she grabbed at the handle he
still hesitated to relinquish. The bag came open between them--and to
his amazement he saw what it contained.
Coals!
A few fell out upon the pavement. Harry stooped, put them in again, and
shut the bag. The young lady had moved away. She was walking on slowly
ahead, and from her shoulders Harry feared that she was crying. He
followed miserably but doggedly with the bag.
She never looked round, and he never took his eyes from those broad,
quivering shoulders. He felt an officious brute, but he had a certain
fierce consolation too: he had got his way--he had not been beaten by a
woman. And the heaviness of the bag, no longer to be wondered at, was
in itself a justification; he also had changed it from hand to hand,
and that more than once, before they came to the top of the hill.
Here he followed his leader down a broad turning to the left, and
thence along a smaller road until she stopped before the low wooden
gate of a shabby little semi-detached house. Evidently this was her
destination, and she was waiting for her bag. And now Harry lost
confidence with every step he took, for the girl stood squarely with
her back to the gate, and her eyes were dry but very bright, as though
she meant to give him a bit of her mind before she let him go.
"You may put it down here."
Harry did so without a word.
"Thank you. You are a stranger to Richmond, I think?"
The thanks had sounded ironical, and the question took Harry aback. The
grey eyes looked amused, and it was the last expression he had expected
in them.
"How did you know that?" he simply asked.
"You are too sunburnt for Richmond, and--perhaps--too gallant!"
"Or officious?"
Her pleasant tone put him at his ease.
"No; it was very kind of you, and one good turn deserves another. Were
you looking for any particular road or house?"
"Yes, for Sandringham, in the Greville Road."
She stood aside and pointed to the name on the little wooden gate.
"Why, this is it!" gasped Harry Ringrose.
"Yes; this is Sandringham," said the girl, with a sort of shamefaced
humour. "No wonder you are disappointed!"
His eyes came guiltily from the little house with the big name. "Then
are you Miss Lowndes?" he inquired aghast.
"That is my name--Mr. Ringrose."
Spoken with the broadest smile, this was the last straw so far as
Harry's manners were concerned.
"How on earth do you know mine?" cried he.
"I guessed it in the road."
"How could you?"
"How did I know you were a stranger to Richmond?" rejoined Miss
Lowndes. "Anybody could see that you have come from foreign parts; and
I had heard all about you from my father. Besides, I expected you. I
only hoped to get home first with my coals. And to be caught like
this--it's really too bad!"
"I am awfully sorry," murmured Harry, and with such obvious sincerity
that Miss Lowndes smiled again.
"I think you may be!" said she. "One may find that stupidity in the
kitchen has run one short of coals at the very moment when they are
wanted most, and the quickest thing may be for one to go oneself and
borrow a few from a friend. But it's hard lines to be caught doing so,
Mr. Ringrose, for all that!"
So this was the explanation. To Harry Ringrose it was both simple and
satisfying; but before he could say a word Miss Lowndes had changed the
subject abruptly by again pointing to the grand name on the gate.
"This is another thing I may as well explain for your benefit, Mr.
Ringrose; it is one of my father's little jokes. When he came here he
was so tickled by the small houses with the large names that he
determined to beat his neighbours at their own game. It was all I could
do to prevent him from having 'Buckingham Palace' painted on the gate.
So you are quite forgiven for finding it difficult to believe that this
was the house, and also for upsetting my coals. And now I think we may
shake hands and go in."
He took with alacrity the fine firm hand which was held out to him, and
felt already at his ease as he followed Miss Lowndes to the steps,
again carrying the bag. By this time, moreover, he had noted and
admired her pretty hair, which was fair with a warm tinge in it, her
rather deep but very pleasant voice, and the clear and healthy skin
which had her father's freshness in finer shades. She was obviously
older than Harry, and stronger-minded as well as less beautiful than
his ideal type. But he had a feeling, even after these few minutes,
which had not come to him in all the hours that he had spent with
Gordon Lowndes. It was the feeling that he had found a real friend.
But the surprises of the evening were only beginning, for while Harry
contemplated a warped and blistered front door, in thorough keeping
with the poverty-stricken appearance of the house, it was opened by a
man-servant not unworthy of the millionaire of the immediate future.
And yet next moment he found himself in a sitting-room as sordid as the
exterior. The visitor was still trying to reconcile these
contradictions when Miss Lowndes followed him slowly into the room,
reading a telegram as she came.
"Are you very hungry, Mr. Ringrose?" said she, looking up in evident
anxiety.
"Not a bit."
"Because I am afraid my father will not be home for another hour. This
is a telegram from him. He has been detained. But it doesn't seem fair
to ask you to wait so long!"
"I should prefer it. I shall do myself much better justice in an hour's
time," said Harry, laughing; but Miss Lowndes still appeared to take
the situation seriously, though she also seemed relieved. And her
embarrassment was notable after the way in which she had carried off
the much more trying contretemps in the road. It was as though there
were something dispiriting in the atmosphere of the poky and
ill-favoured house, something which especially distressed its young
mistress; for they sat for some time without a word, while dusk
deepened in the shabby little room; and it was much to Harry's relief
when he was suddenly asked if he had ever seen the view from Richmond
Hill.
"Never," he replied; "will you show it to me, Miss Lowndes? I have
often heard of it, and I wish you would."
"It would be better than sitting here," said his companion, "though I'm
afraid you won't see much in this light. However, it's quite close, and
we can try."
It was good to be in the open air again, but, as Miss Lowndes observed,
it was a pity she had not thought of it before. In the park the shadows
were already deep, and the deer straggling across the broad paths as
they never do till nightfall. A warm glow still suffused the west, and
was reflected in the river beneath, where pleasure-boats looked black
as colliers on the belt of pink. It was the hour when it is dark
indoors but light without, and yellow windows studded the woody levels
while the contour of the trees was yet distinct. Even where the river
coiled from pink to grey the eye could still follow it almost to
Twickenham, a leaden track between the leaves.
"I only wish it were an hour earlier," added Miss Lowndes when she had
pointed out her favourite landmarks. "Still, it's a good deal
pleasanter here than indoors." She seemed a different being when she
was out of that house; she had been talkative enough since they
started, but now she turned to Harry.
"Tell me about Africa, Mr. Ringrose. Tell me all the interesting things
you saw and did and heard about while you were out there!"
Harry caught his breath with pleasure. It was the unconscious fault of
his adolescence that he was more eager to convey than receive; it was
the complementary defect of the quality of enthusiasm which was Harry's
strongest point. He had landed from his travels loaded like a gun with
reminiscence and adventure, but the terrible return to the old home had
damped his priming, and at the new home the future was the one affair
of his own of which he had had time or heart to think. But now the
things came back to him which he had come home longing to relate. He
needed no second bidding from the sympathetic companion at his side,
but began telling her, diffidently at first, then with all his boyish
gusto as he caught and held her interest, the dozen and one experiences
that had been on his tongue three days (that seemed three weeks) ago.
To talk and be understood--to talk and be appreciated--it was half the
battle of life with Harry Ringrose at this stage of his career. It is
true that he had seen but little, and true that he had done still less,
even in these two last errant years of his. But whatsoever he had seen
or done, that had interested him in the least, he could bring home
vividly enough to anybody who would give him a sympathetic hearing. And
to do so was a deep and a strange delight to him; not, perhaps,
altogether unconnected with mere vanity; but ministering also to a
subtler sense of which the possessor was as yet unconscious.
And Miss Lowndes listened to her young Othello, an older and more
critical Desdemona, who liked him less for the dangers he had passed
than for his ingenuous delight in recounting them. The talk indeed
interested, but the talker charmed her, so that she was content to
listen for the most part without a word. Meanwhile they were sauntering
farther and farther afield, and at length the new Desdemona was
compelled to tell Othello they must turn. He complied without pausing
in the story. Her next interruption was more serious.
"Don't you write?" she suddenly exclaimed.
"Write what?"
"Things for magazines."
"I wish I did! The magazine at school was the only one I ever tried my
hand for. Who told you I wrote?"
"Mrs. Ringrose has shown things to my father, and he thought them very
good. It only just struck me that what you are telling me would make
such a capital magazine sketch. But it was very rude of me to
interrupt. Please go on."
"No, Miss Lowndes, I've gone on too long as it is! Here have I been
talking away about Africa as though nothing had happened while I was
there; and it's only three days since I landed and found
out--everything!"
His voice was strangely altered: the shame of forgetting, the pain of
remembering, saddened and embittered every accent. Miss Lowndes,
however, who had so plainly shared his enthusiasm, as plainly shrank
from him in his depression. Harry was too taken up with his own
feelings to notice this. Nor did he feel his companion's silence; for
what was there to be said?
"You should take to writing," was what she did say, presently. "You
have a splendid capital to draw upon."
"Do you write?"
"No."
"It is odd you should speak of it. There's nothing I would sooner do
for a living--and something I've got to do--only I doubt if I have it
in me to do any good with my pen. I may have the capital, but I
couldn't lay it out to save my life."
He spoke wistfully, however, as though he were not sure. And now Miss
Lowndes seemed the more sympathethic for her momentary lapse. She was
very sure indeed.
"You have only to write those things down as you tell them, and I'm
certain they would take!"
"Very well," laughed Harry, "I'll have a try--when I have time. I
suppose you know what your father promises me?"
"No, indeed I don't," cried Miss Lowndes.
"The Secretaryship of this new Company when it comes out!"
For some moments the girl was silent, and then: "I'd rather see you
writing," she said.
"But this would mean three hundred a year."
"I would rather make one hundred by my pen!"
Harry said that he would, too, as far as liking was concerned, but that
there were other considerations. He added that of course he did not
count upon the Secretaryship, which seemed far too good a thing to be
really within his reach, for it would be many a day before he was worth
three hundred a year in any capacity. Nevertheless, it was very kind of
Mr. Lowndes to have thought of such a thing at all.
"He is kind," murmured the girl, breaking a silence which had
influenced Harry's tone. And it was a something in her tone that made
him exclaim:
"He is the kindest man I have ever met!"
"You really think so?" she cried, wistfully.
"I know it," said Harry, at once touched and interested by her manner.
"It isn't as if he'd only been kind to me. He was more than kind three
days ago, and--and I didn't take it very well from him at first; but I
shall never forget it now! It isn't only that, however; it's his
kindness to my dear mother that I feel much more; and then--he was my
father's friend!"
They walked on without a word--they were nearly home now--and this time
Harry thought less of his companion's silence, for what could she say?
But already he felt that he could say anything to her, and "You knew my
father?" broke from him in a low voice.
"Oh, yes; I knew him very well."
"He has been here?" said Harry, looking at the semi-detached house with
a new and painful interest as they stopped at the gate.
"Yes; two or three times."
"When was the last?"
But the latch clicked with his words, and Miss Lowndes was hastening up
the path.
CHAPTER VIII.
A MILLIONAIRE IN THE MAKING.
There was a bright light in the little drawing-room, and Harry made
sure that the master of the house had returned from town. Miss Lowndes
put the question as soon as the door was opened, however, and he heard
the reply as he followed her within.
"No, miss, not yet."
"Then who is here?"
"Mr. Huxtable."
"Mr. Huxtable--in the drawing-room?"
"He insisted on waiting, and I thought he might as well wait there as
anywhere."
Harry thought the man's manner presumptuous, and, looking at him
severely, was actually answered with a wink. Before he had time to
think twice about that, however, Miss Lowndes marched erect into the
drawing-room, and the visitor at her heels became the unwilling witness
of a scene which he never forgot.
A little bald man had planted himself on the hearthrug, where he stood
trembling like a terrier on the leash, in an attitude of indescribable
truculence and determination.
"Good evening, young lady!" cried he, in a tone so insolent that Harry
longed to assault him on the spot.
"Good evening, Mr. Huxtable. Do you wish to speak to me?"
"No, thank you, miss. Not this time. I've spoken to you often enough
and nothing's come of it. To-night I mean to see your pa. 'E's not come
'ome yet, 'asn't 'e? Then 'ere I stick till 'e does."
"May I ask what you want with him?"
"May you arst?" roared Mr. Huxtable. "I like that, I'm blessed if I
don't! Oh, yes, you may arst, young lady, and you may pretend you don't
know; and much good it'll do you! I want my money; that's what _I_
want. Thirty-eight pound seventeen shillings and fourpence for
butcher-meat delivered at this 'ere 'ouse--that's all _I_ want! If
you've got it 'andy, well and good; and if 'e's got it 'andy when 'e
comes in, well and good again, for 'ere I wait; but if not, I'll
county-court 'im to-morrow, and there's plenty more'll follow my
example. It's a perfect scandal the way this 'ouse is conducted. Not a
coal or a spud, let alone a bit o' meat, are you known to 'ave paid for
this blessed year. It's all over Richmond, and for my part I'm sick of
it. I've been put off and put off but I won't be put off no more. 'Ere
I stick till 'is nibs comes in."
During the first half of this harangue--considerably lengthened by
pauses during which the tradesman gasped for breath and seemed once or
twice on the verge of apoplexy--Harry Ringrose was on the horns of a
dilemma in the hall. One moment he was within an ace of rushing in and
ejecting the fellow on his own responsibility, and the next he felt it
better to spare his new friend's feelings by making his own escape. But
the butcher had only partly said his say when a latch-key grated in the
door, and Gordon Lowndes entered in time to overhear the most
impertinent part. Shutting the door softly behind him, he stood
listening on the mat, with his head on one side and a very comical
expression on his face. Harry had been tremulous with indignation.
Lowndes merely shook with suppressed amusement; and, handing a heavy
parcel to Harry, entered the room, as the tradesman ceased, in a
perfect glow of good-humour and geniality.
"Ah! my dear Huxtable, how are you?" cried he. "Delighted to see you;
only hope I haven't kept you very long. You must blame the Earl of
Banff, not me; he kept me with him until after eight o'clock. Not a
word, my dear sir--not one syllable! I know exactly what you are going
to say, and don't wonder at your wishing to see me personally. My dear
Huxtable, I sympathise with you from my soul! How much is it? Thirty or
forty pounds, eh? Upon my word it's too bad! But there again the Earl
of Banff's to blame, and I've a very good mind to let you send in your
account to him. His Lordship has been standing between me and a million
of money all this year, but he won't do so much longer. I think I've
brought him to reason at last. My good Mr. Huxtable, we're on the eve
of the greatest success in modern finance. The papers will be full of
it in about a week's time, and I shall be a rich man. But meanwhile I'm
a poor one--I've put my all on it--I've put my shirt on it--and I'm a
much poorer man than ever you were, Huxtable. Poor men should hang
together, shouldn't they? Then stand by me another week, and I give you
my word I'll stand by you. I'll pay you thirty shillings in the pound!
Fanny, my dear, write Mr. Huxtable an IOU for half as much again as we
owe him; and let him county-court me for _that_ if he doesn't get it
before he's many days older!"
Mr. Huxtable had made several ineffectual attempts to speak; now he was
left without a word. Less satisfied than bewildered, he put the IOU in
his pocket and was easily induced to accept a couple of the Earl of
Banff's cigars before he went. Lowndes shook hands with him on the
steps, and returned rubbing his own.
"My dear Ringrose," said he, "I'm truly sorry you should have come in
for this little revelation of our _res angusta_, but I hope you will
lay to heart the object-lesson I have given you in the treatment of
that harmful and unnecessary class known as creditors. There are but
two ways of treating them. One is to kick them out neck-and-crop, and
the other you have just seen for yourself. But don't misunderstand me,
Ringrose! I meant every word I said, and he shall have his thirty
shillings in the pound. The noble Earl has been a difficult fish to
play, but I think I've landed him this time. Yes, my boy, you'll be
drawing your three hundred a year, and I my thirty thousand, before
midsummer; but I'll tell you all about it after supper. Why, bless my
soul, that's the supper you've got in your hands, Ringrose! Take it
from him, Fanny, and dish it up, for I'm as hungry as a coach-load of
hunters, and I've no doubt Ringrose is the same."
And now Harry understood the trepidation with which Miss Lowndes had
consulted him as to whether they should wait supper for her father, and
her relief on hearing his opinion on the point: there had been no
supper in the house. Lowndes, however, had brought home material for an
excellent meal, of which caviare, a raised pie, French rolls,
camembert, peaches and a pine-apple, and a bottle of Heidsieck, were
conspicuous elements. Black coffee followed, rather clumsily served by
the man-servant, who waited in a dress suit some sizes too small for
him. And after supper Harry Ringrose at last heard something definite
concerning the Company from which he was still assured that he might
count on a certain income of three hundred pounds a year.
"Last night my tongue was tied," said Lowndes; "but to-night the matter
is as good as settled; and I may now speak without indiscretion. I must
tell you first of all that the Company is entirely my own idea--and a
better one I never had in my life. It is founded on the elementary
principle that the average man gives more freely to a good cause than
to a bad one, but most freely to the good cause out of which he's
likely to get some change. He enjoys doing good, but he enjoys it most
when it pays him best, and there you have the root of the whole matter.
Only hit upon the scheme which is both lucrative and meritorious, which
gives the philanthropist the consolation of reward, and the
money-grubber the kudos of philanthropy, and your fortune's made. You
may spread the Gospel or the Empire, and do yourself well out of
either; but, for my part, I wanted something nearer home--where charity
begins, Ringrose--and it took me years to hit upon the right thing.
Ireland has been my snare: to ameliorate the Irish peasant and the
English shareholder at the same swoop: it can't be done. I wasted whole
months over the Irish Peasants' Potato Produce Company, but it wouldn't
pan out. Nobody will put money into Ireland, and potatoes are cheap
already as the dirt they grow in. But I was working in the right
direction, and the crofter grievances came as a godsend to me about a
year ago. The very thing! I won't trouble you with the intermediate
stages; the Highland Crofters' Salmon and Trout Supply Association,
Limited, will be registered this week; and the greatest of Scottish
landlords, my good old Earl of Banff, is to be Chairman of Directors
and rope in all the rest."
Harry asked how it was to be made to pay. Lowndes had every detail at
his finger-ends, and sketched out an amazing programme with bewildering
volubility. The price of salmon would be reduced a hundred per cent.
The London shops would take none but the Company's fish. Fresh trout
would sell like herrings in the street, and the Company would buy up
the fishmongers' shops all over the country, just as brewers bought up
public-houses. As soon as possible they would have their own line to
the North, and expresses full of nothing but fish would do the distance
without stopping in time hitherto unprecedented in railway annals.
"But," said Harry, "there are plenty of fish in the sea, and in other
places besides the Highlands."
"So there are, but in ten years' time we shall own every river in the
kingdom, and every cod-bank round the coast."
"And where will the crofters come in then?"
Lowndes roared with laughter.
"They won't come in at all. It will be forgotten that they ever were
in: the original Company will probably be incorporated with the British
Fresh Water and Deep Sea Fishing Company, Limited. Capital ten
millions. General Manager, Sir Gordon Lowndes, Bart., Park Lane, W.
Secretary, H. Ringrose, Esq., at the Company's Offices, Trafalgar
Square. We shall buy up the Grand Hotel and have them there. As for the
crofters, they'll be our Empire and our Gospel; we'll play them for all
they're worth in the first year or two, and then we'll let them slide."
Miss Lowndes had been present all this time, and Harry had stolen more
than one anxious glance in her direction. She never put in a word, nor
could she be said to wear her thoughts upon her face, as she bent it
over some needlework in the corner where she sat. Yet it was the
daughter's silent presence which kept Harry himself proof for once
against the always contagious enthusiasm of the father. He could not
help coupling it with other silences of the early evening, and the
Highland Crofters' Salmon and Trout Supply Association, Limited, left
him as cold as he felt certain it left Miss Lowndes. It was now after
eleven, however, and he rose to bid her good-night, while Lowndes went
to get his hat in order to escort him to the station.
"And I shall never forget our walk," added Harry, and unconsciously
wrung her hand as though it were that of some new-found friend of his
own sex.
"Then don't forget my advice," said Miss Lowndes, "but
write--write--write--and come and tell me how you get on!"
It was her last word to him, and for days to come it stimulated Harry
Ringrose, like many another remembered saying of this new friend,
whenever he thought of it. But at the time he was most struck by her
tacit dismissal of the more brilliant prospects which had been
discussed in her hearing.
"A fine creature, my daughter," said Lowndes, on the way to the
station. "She's one to stand by a fellow in the day of battle--she's as
staunch as steel."
"I can see it," Harry answered, with enthusiasm.
"Yes, yes; you have seen how it is with us, Ringrose. There's no use
making a secret of it with you, but I should be sorry for your mother
to know the hole we've been in, especially as we're practically out of
it. Yet you may tell her what you like; she may wonder Fanny has never
been to see her, but she wouldn't if she knew what a time the poor girl
has had of it! You've no conception what it has been, Ringrose. I
couldn't bear to speak of it if it wasn't all over but the shouting.
To-night there was oil in the lamps, but I shouldn't like to tell you
how many times we've gone to bed in the dark since they stopped our
gas. You may keep your end up in the City, because if you don't you're
done for, but it's the very devil at home. We drank cold water with our
breakfast this morning, and I can't conceive how Fanny got in coals to
make the coffee to-night."
Harry could have told him, but he held his tongue. He was trying to
reconcile the present tone of Lowndes, which had in it a strong dash of
remorse, with the countless extravagances he had already seen him
commit. Lowndes seemed to divine his thoughts.
"You may wonder," said he, "how I managed to raise wind enough for the
provender I had undertaken to bring home. I wonder if I dare tell you?
I called at your tailors' on my way to the noble Earl's, and--and I
struck them for a fiver! There, there, Ringrose, they'll get it back
next week. I've lived on odd fivers all this year, and I simply didn't
know where else to turn for one to-day. Yet they want me to pay an
income tax! I sent in my return the other day, and they sent it back
with 'unsatisfactory' written across my writing. So _I_ sent it back
with 'I entirely agree with you' written across theirs, and that seems
to have shut them up. One of the most pestilent forms of creditor is
the tax gatherer, and the income tax is the most iniquitous of all.
Never you fill one in correctly, Ringrose, if you wish me to remain
your friend."
"But," said Harry, as they reached the station and were waiting for the
train, "you not only keep servants----"
"Servants?" cried Lowndes. "We have only one, and she's away at the
seaside. I send her there for a change whenever she gets grumpy for
want of wages. I tell her she looks seedy, and I give her a sovereign
to go. It has the air of something thrown in, and it comes a good deal
cheaper than paying them their wages, Ringrose. I make you a present of
the tip for what it's worth."
"But you have a man-servant, too?"
"A man-servant! My good fellow, that's no servant of mine. I only make
it worth his while to lend a hand."
"Who is he, then?"
"This is your train; jump in and I'll tell you."
The spectacled eyes were twinkling, and the sharp nose twitching, when
Harry leant out of the third-class carriage window.
"Well, who is it?"
"The old dodge, Ringrose, the old dodge."
"What's that?"
"The Man in Possession!"
And Gordon Lowndes was left roaring with laughter on the platform.
CHAPTER IX.
THE CITY OF LONDON.
It was a considerably abridged version of his visit to Richmond which
Mrs. Ringrose received from her son. Gordon Lowndes had indeed given
Harry free leave to tell his mother what he liked, but not even to her
could the boy bring himself to repeat all that he had seen and heard.
He preferred to quote the frank admissions of Lowndes himself, and that
with reticence and a definite object. It was Harry's ambition to remove
his mother's bitterness against the young woman who had never been to
see her; and, by explaining the matter as it had been explained to him,
he easily succeeded, since Mrs. Ringrose would have sympathised and
sorrowed with her worst enemy when that enemy was in distress. In
uprooting one prejudice, however, her son went near to planting another
in its stead.
"I only hope, my boy, that you are not going to fall in love with her."
"Mother!"
"She seems to have made a deep impression on you."
"But not that sort of impression! She is a fine creature, I can see,
and we got on capitally together. We shall probably become the best of
friends. But you need have no fears on any other score. Why, she must
be ever so much older than I am."
"She is twenty-seven. He told me so."
"There you are! Twenty-seven!" cried Harry, triumphantly.
But it was not a triumph he enjoyed. Twenty-seven seemed a great age to
him, and six years an impassable gulf. Doubtless it was just as well,
especially when a person did not in the least resemble another person's
ideal; still, he had not supposed she was so old as that. He wished he
had not been told her age. Certainly it gave him a sense of safety,
just as he was beginning to wonder what the view would be like from
Richmond Hill to-day. But it was a little dull to feel so safe as all
that.
This was the day on which Harry Ringrose had intended to pack up his
African curios and send them off to Lowndes's office. But, after the
conversation of which the above was a snatch, his mother charged him to
do nothing of the kind. If Mr. Lowndes was in such difficulties, it was
certainly not their place to add to them by claiming further favours at
his hands. Harry agreed, but said the idea had originated with Lowndes
himself. His mother was firm on the point, and counselled him either to
sell his own wares or to listen to her and give up the idea.
So Harry haunted the Kensington Public Library, and patiently waited
his turn for such journals as the _Exchange and Mart_. But it was in an
evening paper that he came across the advertisement which brought the
first grist to his mill. A lady in a suburb guaranteed good prices for
secondhand books, left-off jewellery, and all kinds of bric-à-brac and
"articles of vertu," and inserted her advertisement in places as
original as itself. It caught Harry's eye more than once before the
idea occurred to him; but at length he made his way to that suburb with
a pair of ostrich eggs, an assegai, and a battle-axe studded with
brass-headed nails. He came back with a basket of strawberries, a pot
of cream, and several shillings in his pocket. Next evening a
post-office order to the amount of that first-class fare to London was
remitted to Gordon Lowndes, while a new silk hat hung on the pegs, to
give the boy a chance in the City. All that now remained of the curios
were one pair of ostrich eggs and a particularly murderous tomahawk,
with which Harry himself chopped up the empty packing-cases to save in
firewood.
So a few days passed, and the new clothes came home, and Harry Ringrose
was externally smart enough for the Stock Exchange itself, before the
first letter came from Uncle Spencer. He had spoken to several of the
business men among his congregation, but, he regretted to say, with but
little result so far. Not that this had surprised him, as conscience
had of course forbidden him to represent his nephew as other than he
was in respect of that training and those qualifications in which Harry
was so lamentably deficient. He understood that for every vacant post
there were some hundreds of applicants, all of whom could write
shorthand and keep books, while the majority had taken the trouble to
master at least one foreign language. Harry had probably learned French
at school, but doubtless he had wasted his opportunities in that as in
other branches. Shorthand, however, appeared to be the most essential
requirement, and, as it was unfortunately omitted from the
public-school curriculum, Mr. Walthew was sending Harry a "Pitman's
Guide," in the earnest hope that he would immediately apply himself to
the mastery of this first step to employment and independence.
Meanwhile, one gentleman, whose name and address were given, had said
that he would be glad to see Henry if he cared to call, and of course
it was just possible that something might come of it. Henry would
naturally leave no stone unturned, and would call on this gentleman
without delay. Uncle Spencer, however, did not fail to add that he was
not himself sanguine of the result.
"He never is," said Harry. "What's the good of going?"
"You must do what your uncle says," replied Mrs. Ringrose, to whom the
letter had been written.
"But what's the good if he's given me away beforehand? He will have
told the fellow I can't even write an office fist, and am generally no
use, so why should he take me on? And if the fellow isn't going to take
me on, why on earth should I go and see him?"
Mrs. Ringrose pointed out that this was begging the question, and
reminded Harry that his Uncle Spencer took a pessimistic view of
everything. She herself then went to the opposite extreme.
"I think it an excellent sign that he should want to see you at all,
and I feel sure that when he does see you he will want to snap you up.
What a good thing you have your new clothes to go in! Your uncle
doesn't say what the business is, but I am quite convinced it has
something to do with Africa, and that your experience out there is the
very thing they want. So be sure that you agree to nothing until we
have talked it over."
Harry spent a few minutes in somewhat pusillanimous contemplation of
the Pitman hieroglyphs, wondering if he should ever master them, and
whether it would help him so very much if he did. It was not that he
was afraid of work, for he only asked to be put into harness at once
and driven as hard as they pleased. But it was a different matter to be
told first to break oneself in; and to begin instantly and in earnest
and alone required a higher order of moral courage than Harry could
command just then.
But he went into the City that same forenoon, and he saw the gentleman
referred to in his uncle's letter. The interview was not more
humiliating than many another to which Harry submitted at the same
bidding; but it was the first, and it hurt most at the time. No sooner
had it begun than Harry realised that he had no clue as to the
relations subsisting between Mr. Walthew and the man of business, nor
yet as to what had passed between them on the subject of himself, and
he saw too late that he had allowed himself to be placed in a
thoroughly false position. It looked, however, as though the clergyman
had been less frank than he professed, for Harry was put through a
second examination, and his admissions received with the most painful
tokens of surprise. He was even asked for a specimen of his
handwriting, which self-consciousness made less legible than ever; in
the end his name was taken, "in case we should hear of anything," and
he was bowed out with broken words of gratitude on his lips and bitter
curses in his heart.
He went home vowing that he never would submit to that indignity again:
yet again and again he did.
Mr. Walthew was informed of the result of the interview which he had
instigated, and wrote back to say how little it surprised him. But he
mentioned another name and another address, and, in short, sent his
nephew hat-in-hand to some half-dozen of his friends and acquaintances,
none of whom showed even a momentary inclination to give the lad a
trial. Harry did not blame them, but he did blame his uncle for making
him a suppliant in one unlikely quarter after another. Yet he never
refused to go when it came to the point; for, though a week slipped by
without his learning to write a line of shorthand, Harry Ringrose had
character enough not to neglect a chance--no matter how slight--for
fear of a rebuff--no matter how brutal.
Yet he never forgot the exquisite misery of those unwarrantable begging
interviews: the excitement of seeking for the office in the swarming,
heated labyrinth of the City--the depression of the long walk home with
another blank drawn from the bag. How he used to envy the smart youths
in the short black jackets and the shiny hats--all doing something--all
earning something! And how stolidly he looked the other way when in one
or two of those youths he recognised a schoolfellow. How could he face
anybody he had ever known before?--an idler, a pauper, and disgraced.
They would only cut him as he had been cut that first morning on his
way to the old home; therefore he cut them.
But one day he was forced to break this sullen rule: his arm was
grabbed by the man he had all but passed, and a sallow London face
compelled his recognition.
"You're a nice one, Ringrose!" said a voice with the London twang. "Is
it so many years since you shared a cabin on a ship called the
_Sobraon_, with a chap of the name of Barker?"
"I'm awfully sorry," cried Harry with a blush. "You--I wasn't looking
for any one I knew. How are you, Barker?"
"Oh, as well as a Johnny can be in this hole of a City. Thinking of
knocking up again and getting the gov'nor to send me another long
voyage. I'm not a man of leisure like you, Ringrose. What brings _you_
here?"
"Oh, I've only been to see a man," said Harry, without technical
untruth.
"I pictured you loafin' about that rippin' old place in the photos you
used to have up in our cabin. Not gone to Oxford yet, then?"
"No--the term doesn't begin till October. But----" Harry tried to tell
the truth here, but the words choked him, and the moment passed.
"Not till October! Four clear months! What a chap you are, Ringrose; it
makes me want to do you an injury, upon my Sam it does. Look at me! At
it from the blessed week after I landed--at it from half-past nine to
six, and all for a measly thirty-five bob a week. How would you like
that, eh? How would you like that?"
Harry's mouth watered, but he said he didn't know, and contrived to
force another smile as he held out a trembling hand.
"Got to be going, have you?" said the City youth. "I thought you
bloated Johnnies were never in a hurry? Well, well, give a poor devil a
thought sometimes, cooped up at a desk all day long. Good-bye--you
lucky dog!"
The tears were in Harry's eyes as he went his way, yet the smile was
still upon his lips, and it was grimly genuine now. If only the envious
Barker knew where the envy really lay! How was it he did not? To the
conscious wretch it was a revelation that all the world was not
conversant with his disappointment and his disgrace.
To think that he had talked of going up to Oxford next term! It had
never been quite decided, and he blushed to think how he must have
spoken of it at sea. Still more was he ashamed of his want of common
pluck in pretending for a moment that he was going up still.
"'Pluck lost, all lost,'" he thought, remorsefully; "and I've lost it
already! Oh, what would Innes think of me, for carrying his motto in my
heart when I don't need it, and never acting on it when I do!"
That night he wrote it out on the back of a visiting card, and tacked
the tiny text to the wall above his bed:--
"MONEY LOST--LITTLE LOST HONOUR LOST--MUCH LOST PLUCK LOST--ALL LOST."
And his old master's motto sent Harry Ringrose with a stout heart on
many another errand to the City, and steeled and strengthened him when
he came home hopeless in the evening. Yet it was very, very hard to
live up to; and many also were the unworthy reactions which afflicted
him in those dark summer days, that he had expected to be so free from
care, and so full of happiness.
* * * * *
One afternoon he crept down from a stockbroker's office, feeling
smaller than ever (for that stockbroker had made the shortest work yet
of him), to see a man selling halfpenny papers over a placard that
proclaimed "extraordinary scoring at Lord's." A spirit of recklessness
came over Harry, and buying a paper was but the thin end of his
extravagance. A minute later he had counted his money and found enough
to take him to St. John's Wood and into the ground; and it was still
the money that he had obtained for his curios; and town was intolerable
with that sinister London heat which none feel more than your seasoned
salamander from the tropics. Harry's new clothes were sticking to him,
and he thought how delicious it would be at Lord's. To think was to
argue. What was sixpence after all? He had had no lunch, and that would
have cost him sixpence more or less; he would do without any lunch, and
go to Lord's instead.
It was delicious there, and Harry was so lucky as to squeeze into a
seat. Quite a breeze, undreamt of in the City, blew across the ground,
blowing the flannels of the players against their bodies and fetching
little puffs of dust from the pitch. The wicket was crumbling, the long
scores of the morning were at an end. It was only the tail of the
Middlesex team that Harry was in time to see batting, but they were
good enough for him. All his life he had nourished a hopeless passion
for the game, and every care was forgotten until the last man was out.
"Why--Harry?"
He had been looking at the pitch, and he spun round like an arrested
criminal. Yet the strong hand on his shoulder was also delicate and
full of kindness, and he was gazing into the best face he had ever
seen. His ideal woman he was still to find, but his ideal man he had
loved and worshipped from his twelfth year; and here he stood, supple
and athletic as ever, only slimmer and graver; and their hands were
locked.
"Mr. Innes!"
"I had no idea you were in England, Harry."
"I have been back three weeks."
"Why didn't you write?"
He knew everything. Harry saw it in the kind, strong face, and heard it
in a voice rich with sympathy and reproach.
"I was too ashamed," he murmured--and he hung his head.
"You might have trusted me, old fellow," said Mr. Innes. "Come and sit
on top of the pavilion and tell me all about yourself."
At any other time it would have been a sufficient joy to Harry Ringrose
to set foot in that classic temple of the sacred game; now he had eyes
for nothing and nobody but the man who led him up the steps, through
the cricketing throng, up the stairs. And when they sat together on
top, and the ground was cleared, and play resumed, not another ball did
Harry watch with intelligent eyes. He was sitting with the man to whom
he had been too proud to write, but whose disciple he had been at heart
for many a year. He was talking to the object of his early
hero-worship, and he found him his hero still.
Mr. Innes listened attentively, gravely, but said very little himself.
He appreciated the difficulty of starting in life without money or
influence, and was too true a friend to make light of it. He thought
that business would be best if only an opening could be found.
Schoolmastering led to nothing unless one had money or a degree. Still
they must think and talk it over, and Harry must come down to Guildford
and see the new chapel and the swimming-bath. Could he come for a day
or two before the end of the term? Was he sure he could leave his
mother? Harry was quite sure, but would write when he got home.
Then it was time for Mr. Innes to go, but first he gave Harry tea in
the members' dining-room, and after that a lift in his hansom as far as
Piccadilly. So that Harry reached home both earlier and in better case
than he might have done; whereupon Mrs. Ringrose, hearing his key in
the latch, came out to meet him with a face of mystery which contrasted
oddly with his radiance.
"Oh, mother," he cried, "whom do you think I've seen! Innes! Innes! and
he's the same as ever, and wants me to go and stay with him, so you
were right, and I was wrong! What is it then? Who's here?" His voice
sank in obedience to her gestures.
"Your Uncle Spencer," she whispered, tragically.
"Delighted to see him," cried Harry, who had been made much too happy
by one man to be readily depressed by any other.
"He has been waiting to see you since five o'clock, my boy."
"Has he? Very sorry to hear that, uncle," said Harry, bursting into the
sitting-room and greeting the clergyman with the heartiness he was
feeling for all the world. Mr. Walthew looked at his watch.
"Since a quarter before five, Mary," said he, "and now it wants seven
minutes to six. Not that I shall grudge the delay if it be attributable
to the only cause I can imagine to account for it. The circumstances,
Henry, are hardly those which warrant levity; if you have indeed been
successful at last, as I hope to hear----"
"Successful, uncle?"
"I understand that you have been to see the gentleman on the Stock
Exchange, who was kind enough to say that he would see you, and of whom
I wrote to you yesterday?"
"So I have! I had quite forgotten that."
"Forgotten it?" cried Mr. Walthew.
"I beg your pardon, Uncle Spencer," said Harry, respectfully enough;
"but since I saw your friend I have been with Mr. Innes my old
schoolmaster, the best man in the whole world, and I am afraid it has
put the other interview right out of my head."
"He did give you an interview, however?"
"Yes, for about a minute."
"And nothing came of it, as usual?" sneered the clergyman.
"And nothing came of it--as usual--I am very sorry to say, Uncle
Spencer."
"And what time was this?"
"Between two and three."
"You must excuse me, Henry, but I am doing my best to obtain employment
for you--I cannot say I have much hope now--still, I am doing my best,
and I am naturally interested in the use you make of your time. May I
ask--as I think I have a right to ask--where you have spent the
afternoon?"
"Certainly, Uncle Spencer; at Lord's Cricket-ground."
Harry was well aware that he had delivered a bombshell, and he quite
expected to receive a broadside in return. But he had forgotten Uncle
Spencer's mode of expressing superlative displeasure. It has been said
that Mr. Walthew never smiled, but there were occasions when a weird
grin shed a sort of storm-light on his habitual gloom. That was when
indignation baffled invective, and righteous anger fell back on holy
scorn. The present was an occasion in point.
Mr. Walthew stared at Harry without a word, but gradually this unlovely
look broke out upon him, and at last he positively chuckled in his
beard.
"You are out of work, and too incompetent to obtain any," said he, "and
yet you can waste your own time and your mother's money in watching a
cricket-match!"
"I went without my lunch in order to do so," was Harry's defence. "And
besides, it was my money--I got it for my spears and things."
"And you call that your money?" cried Uncle Spencer. "I would not talk
about my money until I was paying for my board and residence under this
roof!"
"Now, that will do!" cried Mrs. Ringrose. "That is my business,
Spencer, and I will not allow you to speak so to my boy."
"Come, come, mother," Harry interrupted, "my uncle is quite right from
his point of view. I admit I had qualms about going to Lord's myself.
But I think I must have been meant to go--I know there was some meaning
in my meeting Innes."
"If anything could surprise me in you, Henry," resumed Mr. Walthew, "it
would be the Pagan sentiments which you have just pained me by
uttering. May you live to pray forgiveness for your heresy, as also for
your extravagance! But of the latter I will say no more, though I
certainly think, Mary, that where my assistance has been invoked I have
a right to speak my mind. The waste of money is, however, even less
flagrant, in my opinion, than the waste of time. It is now several
days, Henry, since I sent you a guide to shorthand. An energetic and
conscientious fellow, as anxious as you say you are to work for his
daily bread, could have mastered at least the rudiments in the time.
Have you?"
"I told you he had not!" cried Mrs. Ringrose. "How can you expect it,
when every day he has been seeking work in the City? And he comes in so
tired!"
"Not too tired to go to Lord's Cricket-ground, however," was the not
unjust rejoinder. "But perhaps his energy has found another outlet?
Last time I was here he was going to write articles and poems for the
magazines--so I understood. How many have you written, Henry?"
Harry scorned to point out that it was his mother's words which were
being quoted against him, not his own; yet ever since his evening at
Richmond he had been meaning to try his hand at something, and he felt
guilty as he now confessed that he had not written a line.
"I was sure of it!" cried the clergyman. "You talk of getting
employment, but you will not take the trouble to qualify yourself for
the humblest post; you talk of writing, but you will not take the
trouble even to write! Not that I suppose for a moment anything would
come of it if you did! The magazines, Henry, do not open their columns
to young fellows without literary training, any more than houses of
business engage clerks without commercial education or knowledge. Yet
it would be something even if you tried to write! It would be something
if you wrote--as probably you would write--for the waste-paper basket
and the dust-bin. But no, you seem to have no application, no energy,
no sense of duty; and what more I can do for you I fail to see. I have
written several letters on your account; I have risked offending
several friends. Nothing has come of it, and nothing is likely to come
of it until you put your own shoulder to the wheel. I have put mine. I
have done _my_ best. My conscience is an easy one, at any rate."
Mr. Walthew caught up his hat and brought these painful proceedings to
a close by rising abruptly, as though his feelings were too much for
him. Mrs. Ringrose took his hand without a word, and without a word
Harry showed him out.
"So his conscience is easy!" cried the boy, bitterly. "He talks as if
that had been his object--to ease his conscience--not to get me work.
He has sent me round the City like a beggar, and he calls that doing
his best! I had a good mind to tell him what I call it."
"I almost wish you had," said Mrs. Ringrose, shedding tears.
"No, mother, there was too much truth in what he says. I have been
indolent. Nevertheless, I believe Innes will get me something to do.
And meanwhile I intend to have my revenge on Uncle Spencer."
"How, my boy?"
Harry had never looked so dogged.
"By getting something into a magazine within a week."
CHAPTER X.
A FIRST OFFENCE.
When Harry Ringrose vowed that he would get something into a magazine
within a week, he simply meant that he would write something and get it
taken by some editor. But even so he had no conception of the odds
against him. Few beginners can turn out acceptable matter at a day's
notice, and fewer editors accept within the week. Fortune, however,
often favours the fool who rushes in.
Harry began wisely by deciding to make his first offering poetical, for
verses of kinds he had written for years, and besides, they would come
quicker if they came at all. Undoubted indolence is also discernible in
this choice, but on the whole it was the sound one, and that very
evening saw Harry set to work in a spirit worthy of a much older
literary hand.
He found among the books the selected poems of Shelley which he had
brought home some mid-summers before as a prize for his English
examination. His own language was indeed the only one for which poor
Harry had shown much aptitude, though for a youth who had scribbled for
his school magazine, and formed the habit of shedding verses in his
thirteenth year, he was wofully ill-read even in that. Let it be
confessed that he took down his Shelley with the cynical and shameless
intention of seeking what he might imitate in those immortal pages. The
redeeming fact remains that he read in them for hours without once
recalling his impious and immoral scheme.
It was years since he had dipped into the book, and its contents caused
him naive astonishment. He had read a little poetry in his desultory
way. Tennyson he loved, and Byron he had imitated at school But in all
his adventurings on the Ægean seas of song, he had never chanced upon
such a cluster of golden islets as the lyrics in this selection. The
epic mainland had always less attraction for him. He found it demand a
concentrative effort, and Harry was very sorry and even ashamed, but he
loved least to read that way. So he left "Alastor" and "The Witch of
Atlas" untouched and untried, and spent half the night in ecstasies
over such discoveries as the "Indian Serenade" and "Love's Philosophy."
These were the things for him; the things that could be written out on
half a sheet of notepaper or learnt in five minutes; the things he
loved to read, and would have died to write.
He forgot his proposed revenge; he forgot his uttered vow. He forgot
the sinister design with which he had taken up his Shelley, and it was
pure love of the lines that left him, when he had blown out his candle,
saying his last-learnt over to himself:
"Rarely, rarely, comest thou,
Spirit of Delight!
Wherefore hast thou left me now
Many a day and night?
Many a weary night and day
'Tis since thou art fled away.
How shall ever one like me
Win thee back again?
With the joyous and the free
Thou wilt scoff at pain.
Spirit false! thou hast forgot
All but those who need thee not.
As a lizard with the shade
Of a trembling leaf,
Thou with sorrow art dismayed----"
Here he stuck fast and presently fell asleep, to think no more of it
till he was getting up next morning. He was invaded with a dim
recollection of this poem while the water was running into his bath. As
he took his plunge, the lines sprang out clear as sunshine after rain,
and the man in the bath made a discovery.
They were not Shelley's lines at all. They were his own.
At breakfast he was distraught. Mrs. Ringrose complained. Harry pulled
out an envelope, made a note first, and then his apology. Mrs. Ringrose
returned as usual to her room, but Harry did not follow her with his
pipe. He went to his own room instead, and sat down on the unmade bed,
with a pencil, a bit of paper, and a frightful furrow between his
downcast eyes. In less than half-an-hour, however, the thing was done:
a highly imitative effort in the manner of those verses which he had
been saying to himself last thing the night before.
The matter was slightly different: the subject was dreams, not delight,
and instead of "Spirit of Delight," the dreams were apostrophised as
"Spirits of the Night." Then the form of the stanza was freshened up a
little: the new poet added a seventh line, rhyming with the second and
fourth, while the last word of the fifth was common to all the stanzas,
and necessitated a new and original double-rhyme in the sixth line of
each verse. Harry found a rhyming dictionary (purchased in his
school-days for the benefit of the school magazine) very handy in this
connection. It was thus he made such short work of his rough draft. But
the fair copy was turned out (in the sitting-room) in even quicker
time, and a somewhat indiscreet note written to the Editor of _Uncle
Tom's Magazine_, though not on the lines which Mrs. Ringrose had once
suggested. A "stamped directed envelope" was also prepared, and
enclosed in compliance with _Uncle Tom's_ very explicit "Notice to
Contributors." Then Harry stole down and out, and posted his missive
with a kind of guilty pride: after all, the deed itself had been a good
deal less cold-blooded than the original intention.
Mrs. Ringrose knew nothing. She had seen Harry scribble on an envelope,
and that was all. She knew how the boy blew hot and cold, and she did
him the injustice of concluding he had renounced his vow, but the
kindness of never voicing her conclusion. Yet his restless idleness,
and a something secretive in his manner, troubled her greatly during
the next few days, and never more than on the Saturday morning, when
Harry came in late for breakfast and there was a letter lying on his
plate.
"You seem to have been writing to yourself," said Mrs. Ringrose, as she
looked suspiciously from Harry to the letter.
"To myself?" he echoed, and without kissing her he squeezed round the
table to his place.
"Yes; that's your writing, isn't it? And it looks like one of my
envelopes!"
It was both. Harry stood gazing at his own superscription, and weighing
the envelope with his eye. He was afraid to feel it. It looked too thin
to contain his verses. It was too thin! Between finger and thumb it
felt absolutely empty. He tore it open, and read on a printed slip the
sweetest words his eyes had ever seen.
"The Editor of _Uncle Tom's Magazine_ has great pleasure in accepting
for publication----"
The title of the verses (a very bad one) was filled in below, the date
below that, and that was all.
"Oh, mother, they've accepted my verses!"
"Who?"
"_Uncle Tom's Magazine._"
"Did you actually send some verses to _Uncle Tom_?"
"Yes, on Tuesday, the day after Uncle Spencer was here. I've done what
I said I'd do. He'll see I'm not such an utter waster after all."
"And you--never--told--me!"
His mother's eyes were swimming. He kissed them dry, and began to make
light of his achievement.
"Mother, I couldn't. I didn't know what you would think of them. I
didn't think much of them myself, nor do I now. The verses in _Uncle
Tom_ are not much. And then--I thought it would be a surprise."
"Well, it wouldn't have been one if I had known you had sent them,"
said Mrs. Ringrose; and now she was herself again. "I only hope, my
boy," she added, "that they will pay you something."
"Of course they will. _Uncle Tom_ must have an excellent circulation."
"Then I hope they'll pay you something handsome. Did you tell the
Editor how long we have taken him in?"
"Mother!"
"Then I've a great mind to write and tell him myself. I am sure it
would make a difference."
"Yes; it would make the difference of my getting the verses back by
return of post," said Harry, grimly.
Mrs. Ringrose looked hurt, but gave way on the point, and bade him go
on with his breakfast. Harry did so with the _Uncle Tom_ acceptance
spread out and stuck up against the marmalade dish, and one eye was on
it all the time. Afterwards he went to his room and read over the rough
draft of his verses, which he had not looked at since he sent them
away. He could not help thinking a little more of them than he had
thought then. He wondered how they would look in print, and referred to
one of the bound _Uncle Toms_ to see.
"Well, have you brought them?" said Mrs. Ringrose when he could keep
away from her no longer.
"The verses? No, dear, I have only a very rough draft of them, which
you couldn't possibly read; and I could never read them to you--I
really couldn't."
"Not to your own mother?"
He shook his head. He was also blushing; and his diffidence in the
matter was not the less genuine because he was swelling all the time
with private pride. Mrs. Ringrose did not press the point. The
pecuniary side of the affair continued to interest her very much.
"Do you think fifty?" she said at length, with considerable obscurity;
but her son knew what she was talking about.
"Fifty what?"
"Pounds!"
"For my poor little verses? You little know their length! They are only
forty-two lines in all."
"Well, what of that? I am sure I have heard of such sums being given
for a short poem."
"Well, they wouldn't give it for mine. Fifty shillings, more like."
"No, no. Say twenty pounds. They could never give you less."
Harry shook his head and smiled.
"A five-pound note, at the very outside," said he, oracularly. "But
whatever it is, it'll be one in the eye for the other uncle! Upon my
word, I think we must go to his church to-morrow evening."
"It will mean going in to supper afterwards, and you know you didn't
like it last time."
"I can lump it for the sake of scoring off Uncle Spencer!"
But that was more easily said than done, especially, so to speak, on
the "home ground," where a small but exclusively feminine and entirely
spiritless family sang a chorus of meek approval to the reverend
gentleman's every utterance. When, therefore, Mr. Walthew added to his
melancholy congratulations a solemn disparagement of all the lighter
magazines (which he boasted were never to be seen in his house), the
echo from those timid throats was more galling than the speech itself.
But when poor Mrs. Ringrose ventured only to hint at her innocent
expectations as to the honorarium, and her brother actually laughed
outright, and his family made equally merry, then indeed was Harry
punished for the ignoble motives with which he had attended his uncle's
church.
"My good boy," cried Uncle Spencer, with extraordinary geniality, "you
will be lucky if you get a sixpence! I say again that I congratulate
you on the prospect of getting into print at all. I say again that even
that is not less a pleasure than a surprise to me. But I would not
delude myself with pecuniary visions until I could write serious
articles for the high-class magazines!"
Between his mother's presentiments and his uncle's prognostications,
the contributor himself endeavoured to strike a happy medium; but even
he was disappointed when an afternoon post brought a proof of the
verses, together with a postal order for ten-and-sixpence. Harry showed
it to his mother without a word, and for the moment they both looked
glum. Then the boy burst out laughing, and the lady followed suit.
"And I had visions of a fiver," said Harry.
"Nay, but I was the worst," said his mother, who was laughing and
crying at the same time. "I said twenty!"
"It only shows how much the public know about such things.
Ten-and-six!"
"Well, my boy, that's better than what your uncle said. How long did it
take you to write?"
"Oh, not more than half an hour. If it comes to that, the money was
quickly earned."
For a minute and more Mrs. Ringrose gazed steadily at an upper sash,
which was one's only chance of seeing the sky through the windows of
the flat. Her lips were tightly pursed; they always were when she was
in the toils of a calculation.
"A thousand a year!" she exclaimed at length.
"What do you mean, mother?"
"Well, if this poem only took you half an hour, you might easily turn
out half a dozen a day. That would be three guineas. Three guineas a
day would come to over a thousand a year."
Harry laughed and kissed her.
"I'll see what I can do," he said; "but I'm very much afraid half a
dozen a week will be more than I can manage. Three guineas a week would
be splendid. I shouldn't have to go round begging for work any more;
they would never give me half as much in an office. Heigho! Here are
the verses for you to read."
He put on his hat, and went into the High Street to cash his order. It
was the first money his pen had ever earned him in the open market,
and, since the sum seemed to Harry too small to make much difference,
he determined to lay out the whole of it in festive and appropriate, if
unjustifiable fashion. The High Street shops met all his wants. At one
he bought a ninepenny tin of mulligatawny, and a five-and-ninepenny
bottle of Perrier Jouet; at another, some oyster patties and meringues
and half a pound of pressed beef (cut in slices), which came to
half-a-crown between them. The remaining shilling he spent on
strawberries and the odd sixpence on cream. He would have nothing sent,
so we may picture a triumphant, but rather laborious return to the
flat.
He found his mother in tears over the proofs of his first verses; she
shed more when he showed her how he had spent his first honorarium. Yet
she was delighted; there had been very little in the house, but now
they would be able to do without the porter's wife to cook, and would
be all by themselves for their little treat. No one enjoyed what she
loved to call a "treat" more than Mrs. Ringrose; and perhaps even in
the best of days she had never had a greater one than that now given
her by her extravagant son. It was unexpected, and, indeed,
unpremeditated; it had all the elements of success; and for one short
evening it made Harry's mother almost forget that she was also the wife
of a fraudulent and missing bankrupt.
Harry, too, was happier than he had been for many a day. In the course
of the evening he stole innumerable glances at his proof, wondering
what this friend or that would think of the verses when they came out
in _Uncle Tom_. Once it was through Lowndes's spectacles that he tried
to look at them, more than once from Mr. Innes's point of view, but
most often with the sterling grey eyes of the girl on Richmond Hill,
who had so earnestly begged him to write. He had heard nothing of her
from that evening to this; her father had not mentioned her in the one
letter Harry had received from him, and neither of them had been near
the flat. But he believed that Fanny Lowndes would like the verses; he
knew that she would encourage him to go on.
And go on he did, with feverish energy, for the next few days. But the
good luck did not repeat itself too soon; for though the first taste of
printer's ink gave the lad energy, so that within a week he had
showered verses upon half the magazines in London, all those verses
returned like the dove to the ark, because it did not also bring him
good ideas, and his first success had spoilt him a little by costing no
effort. Even _Uncle Tom_ would have no more of him; and the unhappy
Harry began to look upon his imitation of Shelley as the mere fluke it
seemed to have been.
CHAPTER XI.
BEGGAR AND CHOOSER.
The one communication which Harry Ringrose had received from Gordon
Lowndes was little more than a humorous acknowledgment of the sum
refunded to him after the sale of the trophies. The writer warmly
protested against the payment of a debt which he himself had never
regarded in that light. The worst of it was that he was not in a
position to refuse such payment. The prospects of the Highland
Crofters' Salmon and Trout Supply Association, Limited, were if
anything rosier than ever. But it was an axiom that the more gigantic
the concern, the longer and more irritating the initial delay, and no
news of the Company would be good news for some time to come.
"Meanwhile I am here every day of my life," concluded Lowndes, "and
pretty nearly all day. Why the devil don't you look me up?"
Indeed, Harry might have done so on any or all of those dreadful days
which took him a beggar to the City of London. His reason for not doing
so was, however, a very simple one. He did not want Lowndes to think
that he disbelieved in the H.C.S. & T.S.A., as he must if he knew that
Harry was assiduously seeking work elsewhere. Harry was not altogether
sure that he did utterly disbelieve in that colossal project. But it
was difficult to put much confidence in it after the revelations at
Richmond, and when it was obvious that the promoter's own daughter
lacked confidence in his schemes. Certainly it was impossible to feel
faith enough in the Highland Crofters' to leave lesser stones unturned.
And yet to let Lowndes know what he was doing might be to throw away
three hundred a year.
So Harry had avoided Leadenhall Street on days when the
company-promoter's boisterous spirits and exuberant good-humour would
have been particularly grateful to him. But this was before he became a
successful literary man. He wanted Lowndes to hear of his success; he
particularly wanted him to tell his daughter. He was not sure that he
should avoid Leadenhall Street another time, nor did he when it came.
This was after the successful effort had realised only half-a-guinea,
and when some subsequent attempt was coming back in disgrace by every
post. Mrs. Ringrose had taken a leaf out of Harry's book, and committed
a letter to the post without even letting him know that she had written
one. An answer came by return, and this she showed to Harry in
considerable trepidation. It was from the solicitor whom she had
mentioned on the day after Harry's arrival. In it Mr. Wintour Phipps
presented his compliments to Mrs. Ringrose, and stated that he would be
pleased to see her son any afternoon between three and four o'clock.
"I thought old friends were barred?" Harry said, reproachfully. "I
thought we were agreed about that, mother?"
"But this is not an old friend of yours or mine, my dear. I never knew
him; I only know what your father did for him. He paid eighty pounds
for his stamps, so I think he might do something for you! And so does
he, you may depend, or he would not write that you are to go and see
him."
"He doesn't insist upon it," said Harry, glancing again at the
solicitor's reply. "He puts it pretty formally, too!"
"Have I not told you that I never met him? It was your father and his
father who were such old friends."
"So he writes to you through a clerk!"
"How do you know?"
"It's the very hand they all tell me I ought to cultivate."
"I have no doubt he is a very busy man. I have often heard your father
say so. Yet he can spare time to see you! You will go to him, my
boy--to please your mother?"
"I will think about it, dear."
The mid-day post brought back another set of rejected verses. Harry
swallowed his pride.
"It's all right, mother; I'll go and see that fellow this afternoon."
And there followed the last of the begging interviews, which in
character and result had little to differentiate it from all the rest.
Harry did indeed feel less compunction in bearding his father's god-son
than in asking favours of complete strangers. He also fancied that he
was better fitted for the law than for business, and, when he came to
Bedford Row, he could picture himself going there quite happily every
day. The knowledge, too, that this Wintour Phipps was under obligations
to his father, sent the young fellow up a pair of dingy stairs with a
confidence which had not attended him on any former errand of the kind.
And yet in less than ten minutes he was coming down again, with his
beating heart turned to lead, but with a livelier contempt for his own
innocence than for the hardness of the world as most lately exemplified
by Wintour Phipps. Nor would the last of these interviews be worth
mentioning but for what followed; for it was on this occasion that
Harry went on to Leadenhall Street to get what comfort he could from
the one kind heart he knew of in the City of London.
But there an unexpected difficulty awaited him. He remembered the
number, but he looked in vain for the name of Gordon Lowndes among the
others that were painted on the passage wall as you went in. So he
doubted his memory and tried other numbers; but results brought him
back to the first, and he climbed upstairs in quest of the name that
was not in the hall. He never found it; but as he reached the fourth
landing a peal of unmistakable laughter came through a half-open door.
And Harry took breath, for he had found his friend.
"Very well," he heard a thin voice saying quietly, "since you refuse me
the slightest satisfaction, Mr. Lowndes, I shall at once take steps."
"Steps--steps, do you say?" roared Lowndes himself. "All right, take
steps to the devil!"
And a small dark man came flying through the door, which was instantly
banged behind him. Harry caught him in his arms, and then handed him
his hat, which was rolling along the stone landing. The poor man
thanked him in an agitated voice, and was tottering down the stairs,
when he turned, and with sudden fury shook his umbrella at the shut
door.
"The dirty scamp!" he cried. "The bankrupt blackguard!"
Harry never forgot the words, nor the working, whiskered face of the
man who uttered them. He stood where he was until the trembling
footfalls came up to him no more. Then he knocked at the door. Lowndes
himself flung it open, and the frown of a bully changed like lightning
to the most benevolent and genial smile.
"You!" he cried. "Come in, Ringrose--come in; I'm delighted to see
you."
"Yes, it's me," said Harry, letting drop the hearty hand which he felt
to be a savage fist unclenched to greet him. "Who did you think it
was?"
"Why, the man you must have met upon the stairs! A little rat of a
creditor I've chucked out this time, but will throw over the banisters
if he dares to show his nose up here again."
Harry was forcibly reminded of the butcher at Richmond.
"So this is the other way of treating them?" said he.
"This is the other way. Ha! ha! I recollect what you mean. Well, I have
some sympathy with a small tradesman whom the fortune of war has kept
out of his money for weeks and months; not a particle for a little Jew
who has the insolence to come up here and browbeat and threaten me in
my own office for a few paltry pounds! If he had written me a civil
note, reminding me of the debt, which was really so small that I'd
forgotten all about it, he should have had his money in time. Now he
may whistle for it till he's black in the face!"
Lowndes's indignation was so much more impressive than that of the
little dark man on the stairs, that Harry's sympathies changed sides
without his knowledge. He merely felt his heart warm to Lowndes as the
latter took him by the arm and led him through the outer office (in
which an undersized urchin was mastheaded on an abnormally high stool)
into an inner one, where a red-nosed man sat at the far side of a large
double desk.
"My friend Mr. Backhouse," said Lowndes, introducing the red-nosed man.
"We're not partners; not even in the same line of business; but we
share the office between us, and the clerks, too--don't we, Bacchus?"
The red-nosed man grinned at his blotting-pad, and Harry perceived that
the "clerks" consisted of the small child in the outer office.
"I noticed your name down below in the passage," said Harry to Mr.
Backhouse, "but I couldn't see yours, Mr. Lowndes. I nearly went away
again."
"Ah! it's in Backhouse's name we have the office; it suits my hand to
keep mine out of it. I'm playing a deep game, Ringrose--one of the
deepest that ever was played in the City of London. I stand to win a
million of money!"
Lowndes had assumed an air of suitable subtlety and mystery; his eyes
were half-closed behind their gold-rimmed lenses, and he nodded his
head slowly and impressively as he stood with his back to the
fireplace. Harry noticed that he still wore the shabby frock-coat, and
that his trousers were as baggy as ever at the knees. He could not help
asking how the deep game was progressing.
"Slowly, Ringrose, slowly, but as surely as the stride of time itself.
My noble Earl is up in the Highlands with his yacht. Insisted on
looking into the thing with his own eyes. That's what's keeping us all,
but I expect him back in another week, and then, Ringrose, you may
throw up your hat; for I have not the slightest shadow of a doubt as to
the result of the old chap's investigations."
Here the clock struck four, and the red-nosed man, who had also a stiff
leg, put on his hat, and stumped out of the office.
"Now we can talk," said Lowndes, shutting the door, giving Harry a
chair, and sitting down himself. "He'll be gone ten minutes. It's his
whisky-time; he has a Scotch whisky every hour as regularly as the
clock strikes. Wonderful man, Bacchus, for I never saw him a penn'orth
the worse. Some day he'll go pop. But never mind him, Ringrose, and
never mind the Company; tell us how the world's been using you, my boy;
that's more to the point."
So Harry told him about the accepted verses, and Gordon Lowndes not
only promised to tell his daughter, but was himself most emphatic in
encouraging Harry to go on as he had begun. It might be his true
vocation after all. If he wrote a book and made a hit it would be a
better thing even than the Secretaryship of the H.C.S. & T.S.A. The
delay there was particularly hard lines on Harry. Lowndes only hoped he
was letting no chances slip meanwhile.
"It is always conceivable," said he, "that my aristocratic directors
may each have a loafing younger son whom they may want to shove into
the billet. You may depend upon me, Ringrose, to resist such jobbery
tooth-and-nail; but, if I were you, I wouldn't refuse the substance for
the shadow; you could always chuck it up, you know, and join us just
the same."
"Then you won't be offended," said Harry, greatly relieved, "if I tell
you that I have had one or two other irons in the fire?"
"Offended, my boy? I should think you a duffer if you had not."
In another minute Harry had made a clean breast of his other journeys
to the City, and was recounting the latest of those miserable
experiences when Lowndes cut him short.
"What!" cried he, "your father paid for the fellow's stamps, and he
refused to pay for yours?"
"We never got so far as that," said Harry bitterly. "He wanted a
premium with me, and that settled it. He said three hundred guineas was
the usual thing, but in consideration of certain obligations he had
once been under to my father (he wasn't such a fool as to go into
particulars), he would take me for a hundred and fifty. And he made a
tremendous favour of that. He expected me to go down on my knees with
gratitude, I daresay, but I just told him that a hundred and fifty was
as far beyond me as three hundred, and said good afternoon and came
away. Mind you, I don't blame him. Why should I expect so much for so
little? He's no worse than any of the rest; they're all the same, and I
don't blame any of them. Who am I that I should go asking favours of
any one of them? My God, I've asked my last!"
"You're your father's son, that's who you are," said Gordon Lowndes.
"What your father did for this skunk of a solicitor, he should be the
first man to do for you. What's his name, by the way?"
"Phipps."
"Not Wintour Phipps?"
Harry nodded; and his nod turned up every light in the other's
expressive face. Gordon Lowndes seized his hat and was on his legs in
an instant, as radiant and as eager as when he set out to chasten and
correct Harry's tailors. Such little punitive crusades were in fact the
salt and pepper of his existence.
"My boy," he cried, "I've known Wintour Phipps for years. I know enough
to strike Wintour Phipps off the rolls to-morrow. I guess he'll do
anything for me, will Wintour Phipps! So you sit just as tight as wax
till I come back. I shan't be long." And he was gone before Harry
grasped his meaning sufficiently to interfere. For the young fellow was
apt to be slow-witted when taken by surprise: and though he ran
headlong down the stairs a minute later, he was only in time to see
Lowndes dive into a hansom on the other side of the crowded street, and
be driven away.
He could do nothing now. He was annoyed with Lowndes, and yet the man
meant well--by Harry, at all events Others might take him as they found
him, and call him a scamp if they chose. Very possibly he was one;
indeed, on his own showing, in his own stories, he was nothing else.
But he had a kind heart, and Harry's needs and rebuffs inclined him to
rate a sympathetic rogue far higher in the moral scale than a callous
paragon. Whatever else might be said of Lowndes, there was no end to
the trouble he would take for another. Even when he insisted on doing
what the person most concerned would have had him leave undone (as in
this instance), it was impossible not to feel grateful to him for doing
anything at all. His unselfish enthusiasm in other people's causes was
beyond all praise. He might not be a good man, but that was a virtue
which many a good man had not.
Still Harry was annoyed. What Gordon Lowndes had gone to say to Wintour
Phipps he could only conjecture; but the object was plainly
intercessory, and Harry hated the thought of such intercession on his
behalf. There was nothing for it, however, but to climb upstairs again
(he had done so), and patiently to await the return of Lowndes. So the
afternoon passed. Mr. Backhouse stumped in, took his hat off, wrote
letters, reached his hat, and stumped out again. But still no Lowndes.
"Good-night," said Harry to the retreating Bacchus.
"Oh, I'm not going--I shall be back directly," replied that methodical
man. "I have a little business down below." And he was back in ten
minutes, sucking his moustache, and followed almost immediately by
Gordon Lowndes, who stalked into the room with an air which Harry had
not before seen him affect. His triumph was self-evident, but it was
beautifully suppressed. He put down his hat with exasperating
deliberation, and then stood beaming at Harry through his glasses.
"Well?" said Harry.
"It's all right," said Lowndes, very quietly, as of a foregone
conclusion: "you may start work to-morrow, Ringrose. Our friend Phipps
will be only too glad to have you. He will pay for the stamps for your
articles, and, so far from charging you a premium, he will give you a
small salary from the beginning. It won't be much, but then articled
clerks as a rule get nothing. Our friend Phipps is going to make an
exception in your case--and just you let me know when he treats you
again as he did this afternoon. He never will! You'll find him tame
enough now. You're to go to him again to-morrow morning; and you see if
he don't receive you with open arms!"
"But why?" cried Harry. "What have you said?"
"What have I said? Well, I reminded him of a trifling incident which
there was no need to remind him of at all, for the mere thought of it
turned him pale the moment he saw me. So I took the liberty of showing
him what might still happen if he didn't do exactly what I wanted about
you. My boy, the thing was settled in two minutes. A rising young
fellow like Wintour Phipps is not the man to be struck off the rolls if
he knows it! But I wasn't coming away without having the whole thing
down in black and white, and here it is."
From his inner pocket he took out a long blue envelope and slapped it
down on the desk.
"May I see?" said Harry in a throbbing voice.
"Certainly; it's your business now, not mine."
Harry ran his eye over the brief document. Then he looked up.
"It's my business now--not yours?"
"To be sure."
"Then I'm very much obliged to you, Mr. Lowndes, but here's an end of
it."
He tore the paper twice across, and carefully dropped it into the
waste-paper basket. Then he looked up again. And he had never seen
Lowndes really pale until that moment, nor really red until the next.
Yet the storm passed over after all.
"Well--upon--my--soul!" said Gordon Lowndes, very slowly, but with more
humour and less wrath in each successive word. "And you're the man who
wanted a billet!"
"I want one still, but not on such terms. I'd rather starve."
"There's no accounting for taste."
"But I'm very sorry, I am indeed, that you should have troubled
yourself to no purpose," continued Harry, holding out his hand with
genuine emotion. "It was awfully good of you, and I shall never forget
it."
"Nonsense--nonsense!" said Lowndes sharply. "Don't name it, my good
fellow. We all look at these things differently--don't we, Bacchus? You
wouldn't have had any scruples, would you? No more would I, my boy, I
tell you frankly. But don't name it again. It was no trouble at all,
and, even if it had been, there's nothing I wouldn't do for any of you,
Ringrose, and now you know it. Hurt my feelings? Not a bit of it, my
dear boy, I'm only frightened I hurt yours. Good night, good night, and
my love to the old lady. Cut away home and tell her I've no more
principles than Bacchus has brains!"
But Harry thought the matter over in the Underground; and it was many a
day before he mentioned it at the flat.
CHAPTER XII.
THE CHAMPION OF THE GODS.
Harry had gathered that another week would decide the fate of the
H.C.S. & T.S.A., Ltd., and he could not help feeling anxious as that
week drew to its close. Not that he himself had gained much confidence
in the mighty scheme in question, for he found it more and more
impossible to believe very deeply in Gordon Lowndes or any of his
works. Yet he knew now that Lowndes would help him if he could, by fair
means or by foul, and he could say the same of no other man. Lowndes
was not merely his friend, but his only friend in London, and you
cannot afford to be hypercritical of an only friend. He might be
unscrupulous, he might be unreliable, but he stood by himself for
staunchness and the will to help. He might be a straw for sinking
hopes, but there was no spar in sight.
So Harry searched the papers at the Public Library, not only for likely
advertisements (which he would answer to the tune of several stamps a
day), but also for the announcement of the return from Scotland of the
Earl of Banff, K.G. When that announcement appeared, and two or three
days slipped by without a line from Lowndes, though the week was more
than up, then, and not until then, did Harry Ringrose abandon his last
hope of getting anything to do in London. His one friend there had
failed him, and was very likely himself in prison for debt. He had, it
is true, an infinitely better friend at Guildford, whom he was on the
eve of visiting, and who might help him to some junior mastership, but
this was the most that he could hope for now. Such a post would in all
probability separate him from his mother, but even that would be better
than living upon her as he was now doing. And in London he seemed to
stand no chance at all.
To this melancholy conclusion had Harry come on the day before he was
to go to Guildford, when the electric bell began ringing as though it
was never going to stop, and there stood Lowndes himself at ten o'clock
in the morning. Harry instantly demanded to be told the worst or the
best. The other held up his finger and shook his head. His face seemed
wilfully inscrutable, but it was also full of humour and encouragement.
"The fact is, Ringrose," said Lowndes, "I have heard so much of that
blessed Company every day for so many months, that I mean to give
myself one day without thinking or speaking about it at all. Come to me
to-morrow and you shall know everything. Meanwhile you and your mother
must dine with me this evening to celebrate the occasion. Let us say
the Grand Hotel and seven o'clock. Then we can all go to some theatre
afterwards."
Harry ran to tell his mother he felt certain the Company was coming out
at last, and to repeat this invitation word for word; but he had great
difficulty in getting her to accept it. How could she go out again? She
might be seen; it would look so bad; and she did not want to enjoy
herself. Then, said Harry, neither did he; and so gained his point by
rather doubtful means. Lowndes, who was on his way to the City, and
would not come in, whispered to Harry that a little outing would do his
mother all the good in the world; then his eyes fell, and he stood
quizzically contemplating the shiny suit which he still seemed to
prefer to all the new ones he had ordered from Harry's tailors.
"I think, Ringrose," said he, "that you and I had better dress. I keep
some war-paint in the City, so it will be no trouble to either of us.
Tell your mother not to bother, however, as my daughter will not be in
evening dress. I forgot to mention, by the way, that she is coming in
to pay her belated respects to Mrs. Ringrose this afternoon, and I want
you to be so good as to bring her along with you to the Grand Hotel.
Seven o'clock, recollect, and you and I will dress."
With that he ran down the stone stairs, and the swing doors closed
behind him with a thud while Harry Ringrose still loitered on the
landing outside the flat. Delighted as he was at the unwonted prospect
of a little gaiety, and more than thankful for all that it implied,
those emotions were nothing to the sudden satisfaction with which he
found himself looking forward to seeing Miss Lowndes again and at the
flat. It is true that the keener pleasure was also the less perfect. It
was mingled with a personal anxiety which it was annoying to feel, but
which Harry could not shake off. He was unreasonably anxious that his
mother should like Miss Lowndes, and that Miss Lowndes should like his
mother. And yet he told himself it was a natural feeling enough; he
recalled its counterpart in old days when he had taken some
schoolfellow home for the holidays.
As for Mrs. Ringrose, she was not only pleased to hear the girl was
coming, but regarded that unprecedented fact as a happier augury than
any other circumstance.
"I really think you must be right," said she, "and that the ship he has
always talked about is coming in at last. I am sure I hope it is true,
for I know of nobody who would make a better millionaire than Mr.
Lowndes. He is generous with his money when it seems that he has less
than I should have believed possible, so what will he be when he is
really rich! But he never would tell me what his great scheme was; and
I am not sure that I altogether care for it from your description, my
boy. I like Mr. Lowndes immensely, but I am not sure that I want to see
you concerned in a pure speculation. However, let us hope for the best,
and let neither of them suppose that we do not believe the best. Yes,
of course, I shall be glad to see the daughter. Go down, my boy, and
tell the porter's wife to come up and speak to me."
When in the fulness of time Miss Lowndes arrived, the door was opened
by neither Harry nor Mrs. Ringrose, and the flat was brightened by a
few fresh flowers which the former had brought in without exciting his
mother's suspicions. Mrs. Ringrose, indeed, had an inveterate love of
entertaining, which all her troubles had not killed in her, and she
received the visitor in a way that made Harry draw a very long breath.
Palpably and indeed inexplicably nervous as she came in, so genial was
the welcome that the girl recovered herself in a moment, and in another
Harry's anxieties were at an end. Once she had mastered her momentary
embarrassment, it was obvious that Miss Lowndes was in infinitely
better spirits than when he had seen her last at Richmond. She looked
younger; there was a warmer tinge upon her cheek, her eyes were
brighter, her dress less demure. Harry had only to look at her to feel
assured that fortune was smiling after all upon the H.C.S. & T.S.A.;
and he had only to hear the two women talking to know that they would
be friends.
Miss Lowndes explained why she had never been to call before. She said
frankly that they had been terribly poor, and she herself greatly tied
in consequence. She spoke of the poverty in the perfect tense, with the
freedom and nonchalance with which one can afford to treat what is
passed and over. Nothing could have been more reassuring than her tone,
nothing pleasanter than the way in which she and Mrs. Ringrose took to
one another. Harry was so pleased that he was quite contented to sit by
and listen, and to wait upon Miss Lowndes when the tea came in, and
only put in his word here and there. It was his mother who would speak
about the accepted verses, and when Harry fled to dress he left her
ransacking the escritoire for his notorious outrage on Gray's Elegy.
Nor was this the final mark of favour. When they started for Charing
Cross, it was Mrs. Ringrose who insisted that they should take an
omnibus, and Mrs. Ringrose who presently suggested that the young
people would be cooler outside. It was as though Fanny Lowndes had made
a deeper impression on Harry's mother than on Harry himself.
Now, there is no more delightful drive than that from Kensington to the
Strand, at the golden end of a summer's afternoon and on the top of a
Hammersmith omnibus. If you are so fortunate as to get a front seat
where nobody can smoke in your face and the view is unimpeded, it is
just possible that your coppers may buy you as much of colour and
beauty and life and interest as Harry Ringrose obtained for his; but
certainly Harry was very young and much addicted to enthusiasm over
small things; and perhaps nobody else is likely to breast the first
green corner of the Gardens with the thrill it gave him, or to covet a
certain small house in Kensington Gore as he coveted it, or to see with
his eyes through the railings and the thick leaves of the Park, or to
read as much romance upon the crowded flagstones of Piccadilly. Already
he knew and loved every furlong of the route; but Fanny Lowndes was the
first companion who had been with him over the ground; and afterwards,
when he came to know every yard, every yard was associated with her.
The beginning of the Gardens henceforth reminded Harry of his first
direct question about the Company, and her assurances ever afterwards
accompanied him to the Memorial. That maligned monument he never passed
again without thinking of the argument it had led to, without deploring
his companion's views as to gilt and gay colours, without remembering
sadly that it was the one subject on which they disagreed that happy
summer evening. He found her more sympathetic even than he had been
imagining her since their first meeting. They touched a score of topics
on which their spirits jumped as one: in after days he would recall
them in their order when he came that way alone, and see summer
sunshine through the dripping fogs, and green leaves on the black
branches in the Park.
Their last words he remembered oftenest, because even the Underground
leads to Trafalgar Square, and it was there that they were spoken. The
shadows of the column lay sharp and black across the Square; that of
the Admiral was being run over by innumerable wheels in the road
beyond, and the low sun flashed in every window of the Grand Hotel.
"Our future offices!" laughed Harry, pointing to the pile.
"I don't think I want them to be yours," said Fanny Lowndes.
"Why not?"
"I want you to go on with your writing."
"But you see how little good I am. One thing accepted out of seven
written! I should never make bread and butter at it."
"You have not done what I told you to do at Richmond. You should try
prose, and draw on your own experiences."
"Would you be my critic?"
"If I had the qualifications."
"Well, will you read me and say what you think?"
"With all my heart."
"Then I'll set to work as soon as ever I get back from Guildford. You
would put pluck into a mouse, Miss Lowndes, and I'll try to deserve the
interest you take in me."
The omnibus stopped, and their eyes met with a mutual regret as they
rose. Harry could not have believed that a change of fortune would so
change a face; that of Miss Lowndes was always lighted by intelligence
and kindness, but with the light of happiness added it was almost
beautiful. And yet, the fine eyes fell before Harry's, and fell again
as he handed her to the curb with a cordial clasp, so that the boy was
thoughtful as they crossed to the hotel, thinking of her nervousness at
the flat.
A few hours later he could understand the daughter of Gordon Lowndes
feeling nervous in accompanying comparative strangers to public places
under the wing of that extraordinary man.
It was evident from the first
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