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-á;-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 a
mong 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.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 135