Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  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 that Lowndes was in a highly excitable state. Harry overheard him telling his daughter she was five minutes late in a tone which made his young blood boil. But it was the hotel officials who had the chief benefit of the company-promoter’s mood. Something was wrong with the soup — Harry was talking to Miss Lowndes and never knew what. All he heard was Lowndes sending for the head waiter, and the harangue that followed. The head waiter ventured to answer; he was instantly told to fetch the general manager. A painful scene seemed inevitable, but the worst was over. In making two officials miserable, and in greatly embarrassing his daughter and his guests, it suddenly appeared that Lowndes had quite recovered his own spirits, and the manager found a boisterous humourist instead of the swashbuckler for whom he had come prepared. The complaint was waived with dexterous good-nature; but care seemed to be taken that no loophole should be given for a second. The remainder of the repast was unexceptionable (as, indeed, the soup had seemed to Harry), and Lowndes, who drank a good deal of champagne, continued uproariously mirthful almost to the end. He told them the name of the piece for which he had taken stalls. It had only been produced the previous evening, so none of them could say that they had seen it before.

  “I don’t know what it’s like,” added Lowndes. “I never read criticisms. Have you seen anything about it, Ringrose?”

  “Why, yes,” said Harry; “I looked in at the library this morning, and I saw two or three notices. They say it is a good enough play; but there was a bit of a row last night. The papers are full of it. In fact that’s how I came to read the criticisms.”