Harry bowed.
“That is enough for me,” he said, “and I apologise for those last words — but you would understand them if you had heard all that passed this morning.”
“I do not want to know what passed. My father’s affairs are not necessarily mine. I cannot tell you what you want to know because — I do not know myself.”
“You have made that clear to me,” said Harry, staring out of the window and through the fog. He could see the gate with the ridiculous name still painted upon it. It stood wide open as he had left it in his haste. He thought of the first time he had seen it and entered by it; he thought of the second time, which had also been the last; and all at once he thought of a question asked upon the other side of the gate, and never answered, nor repeated, nor yet remembered, from that day to this.
He turned to his companion.
“You once told me that you knew my father?”
“Yes, I knew him.”
“You have seen him here in this house?”
“Yes.”
“I am going to ask you what I asked you once before. You did not answer then. I entreat you to do so now. When was the last time you saw my father in this house?”
The girl drew back in dismay; not a syllable came from her parted lips.
“Was it since I asked you the question last?” cried Harry, his imagination at its wildest work in a moment.
“No.”
“Was it after he was supposed to have disappeared?”
“No.”
“Was it after he left my mother up north?”
Miss Lowndes turned away, but there was a mirror over the mantelpiece, and in it he could see her scarlet anguish. Harry set his teeth. He must know the truth — the truth came first.
“So he was here on his way through town. I understood it was my mother who saw him last. I have to thank you — I do so from my heart — for setting me so far upon the right track. Oh, I know what it must be to you to have such things forced from you! I hate to press you like this. No, Miss Lowndes, duty or no duty, you have only to say the word, and I will leave you alone.” He could not bear the sight of her quivering shoulders, of the pretty pink ear that was all her hands now let him see of her face. Unconsciously, however, he had made his strongest appeal in his latest words; his magnanimity fired that of the girl, his consideration touched her to the quick, and she turned to him with noble impulse in her frank, wet eyes.
“I will tell you of the last time I saw your father,” she cried, “on one condition. You are to question me no more when I have finished.”
Harry took her hand.
“I promise,” he said, and released it instantly. It was no time to think of her. He must think only of his purpose — his duty — his sacred obligation as a son.
“It was on Easter Eve,” said his friend steadily. “I was up in my room — it was just dinner-time — and I saw him come in at the gate.” She could not conceal a shudder. “He looked terrible — terrible — so sad and so old! My father must have seen him too. I heard their voices, but I did not hear what they said; my father lowered his voice, and I thought I heard him telling Mr. Ringrose to do the same. It was all I did hear. My father came upstairs and said a business friend had come unexpectedly, and would I mind not coming down? So my dinner was sent up to me, and afterwards in the dark I saw them go together to the gate; and at the very gate they met that dreadful man — that man whose face alone is enough to haunt one. Oh, you know him better than any of us! You are a master in the same school.”
“Not now,” said Harry. “I left yesterday on that man’s account. Didn’t he come here yesterday to tell your father?”
“Not here. He may have been to the new offices. I saw last night there had been some unpleasantness. Unpleasantness! If you knew what we have suffered from that monster! One reason why we got in such difficulties was because he was always coming — —” She checked herself suddenly, with a gesture of disgust and of some underlying emotion.
“And is that all?” asked Harry gently. “Am I to know nothing beyond that meeting at the gate?”
“No, I will tell you the very last I saw of your father — and I will tell you what I think. The very last I saw of him was when they all three went out together after talking for a few minutes in the dining-room below mine. I did not hear a word. What I think is — may God forgive me, whether I am right or wrong — that the flight was arranged in those few minutes.”
“You think your father knew all about it?”
“I cannot help thinking that.”
“When did he come back?”
The girl turned white.
“Your promise!” she gasped. “You promised to ask no more questions!”
“I see,” said Harry, grimly. “Your father crossed the Channel with mine. This is news indeed!”
“It is not!” cried Miss Lowndes. “I don’t admit it. I don’t know it. I don’t believe it. He told me he had been up in Scotland; he was always going up to Scotland then. Oh, why do you try to wring more from me than I know? I have told you all I know for a fact. Why do you break your promise?”
“I didn’t mean to,” he answered brokenly. “And yet — it was my duty — to my poor father.”
“Your father is gone,” she cried. “Spare mine — and me.”
“Do you mean that he is — dead?”
She looked at him an instant with startled eyes, as though his had read the secret suspicion of her heart; then with a wild sob, “I do not know, I do not know,” she cried piteously. With that she burst into tears. He tried to soothe her. “Leave me — leave me,” was all her answer, and in his helplessness he turned to do so — to leave her bowed down and weeping passionately — weeping as he had never seen woman weep before — in the chair from which she had risen to welcome him — with that foolish paper still lying crumpled at her feet.
It was so he saw her when he turned again at the door, for a last look at his friend. The white fog pressed against the panes; a little mist there was in the room, but the fire burnt very brightly, and against the glow were those small ears pink with shame, those strong hands racked with anguish, that fine head bowed low, that lissom figure bent double in the beautiful abandon of a woman’s grief. Young blood took fire. He forgot everything but her. He could not and he would not leave her so; in an instant his arms were about her, he was kissing her hair.
“I love you — I love you — I love you!” he whispered. “Let us think of nothing else. If we are never to see each other again, thank God I have told you that!”
She pushed him back in horror.
“But it is dreadful, if it is true,” she said; and yet she held her breath until he vowed it was.
“I have loved you for months,” he said, “though I didn’t know it at first. I never meant to love you. I couldn’t help myself — it makes me love you all the more.” And his arms were round her once more, in the first earnest passion of his life, in the first sweet flood of that passion.
“If you love me,” she whispered, “will you ask no more questions of me — or of anybody? They will not bring your father back. They may only implicate — my ather — just as he is coming through his hard, hard struggles. Can you not leave it in the hands of Providence — for my sake? It is all I ask; and I think — if you do — it may all come right — some day.”
“With you?” he cried. “With you and me?”
“Who knows?” she answered. “You may not care for me so long; but when there are no more mysteries — well, yes — perhaps.”
“Shall I ever see you meanwhile?”
“Not until there are no more mysteries — or quarrels.”
“Yet you will not let me try to clear them up.”
“I want you to leave them in the hands of Providence — for my sake.”
“It is hard!”
“But if you love me you will promise.”
The cab was still waiting in the mist. Harry sprang into it, wild with unhidden grief, as one fresh from a death-
bed. His perplexity was returning — his conscience was beginning to gnaw — yet one difficulty was solved.
He had promised.
A hansom stood at the curb below the flats; the porter was taking down the luggage; a lady and a gentleman were on the stairs.
“I hope, for every reason, that we shall find him in,” the gentleman was saying. “If not I must wait a little, for I feel that a few words from me may be of value to him at this juncture, quite apart from the little proposal I have to make.”
“I would not count on his accepting it,” the lady ventured to observe.
“My dear Mary — —”
Uncle Spencer got no further. Harry’s arms were round his mother’s neck. And in a few moments they were all three in the flat, where the porter’s wife had the fires lighted and everything comfortable in response to a telegram from Mrs. Ringrose.
“But we must have the gas lit,” cried the lady. “I want to look at you, my dear, and I cannot in this fog.”
“It’ll keep, mother, it’ll keep,” said Harry, who had his own reasons for not courting a close inspection.
“I quite agree with Henry,” said Mr. Walthew. “To light the gas before it is actually dark is an extravagance which I cannot afford. I do not permit it in my house, Mary.” Harry promptly struck a match.
“Come, my boy, and let me have a look at you,” said Mrs. Ringrose when the blinds were drawn. She drew his face close to hers. “Let him say what he likes,” she whispered: “I have been with them all this time. Never mind, my darling,” she cried aloud; “it must have been a horrid place, and I am thankful to have you back.”
Mr. Walthew prepared to say what he liked, his pulpit the hearthrug, and his theme the fiasco of the day before.
“I must say, Mary, that your sentiments are astounding. Naturally he looks troubled. He has lost the post it took him four months to secure. I confess, Henry, that I, for my part, was less surprised this morning than when I heard you had obtained your late situation. With the very serious limitations which I learnt from your own lips, however, you could scarcely hope to hold your own in a scholastic avocation. I told you so, in effect, at the time, if you remember. Was it the Greek or the mathematics that caused your downfall?”
Harry had not said what it was in his letter. He now explained, with a grim smile as he thought of Mangnall’s Questions and Little Steps to Great Events. He described Scrafton’s brutality in a few words, and in fewer still the scene of the day before. His mother’s indignation was even louder than her applause. Uncle Spencer looked horrified at them both.
“So it was insubordination!” cried he. “You took the side of the boys against their master and your elder! Really, Henry, there is no more to be said. Your mother’s sympathy I consider most misplaced. I tell you frankly that you need expect none from me.”
“Did I say I expected any, Uncle Spencer?”
“That,” said Mr. Walthew, “is a remark worthy of your friend Mr. Lowndes, the most impudent fellow I ever met in my life.”
“He is no longer a friend of mine,” said Harry Ringrose.
“I am glad to hear it, Henry.”
“Do you mean that you have quarrelled?” cried Mrs. Ringrose.
“For good, mother; you shall hear about it afterwards. I can’t forgive a liar, and no more must you. I have bowled Lowndes out in a thundering lie — and told him what I thought of him — that’s all.”
Mrs. Ringrose looked troubled, but inquisitive for particulars. Her brother did not smile, but for an instant his expression ceased to be that of a professional mute.
“‘Liar’ and ‘lie,’” said he, “are stronger language than I approve of, Henry; but if anybody deserves such epithets I feel sure it is Mr. Gordon Lowndes. The man impressed me as a falsehood-teller when he came to my house, and I feel sure that the prospectus of this new Crofter Company, which reached me this morning, is nothing but a tissue of untruths from beginning to end. A thoroughly bad man, Henry, a lost and irredeemable sinner, who might have dragged you with him to fire eternal!”
“I did not find him thoroughly bad, Uncle Spencer,” said his nephew civilly. “On the contrary, I believe there is more good in him than in most of us; but — you can’t depend upon him, and there you are.”
“Yet you would defend him!” exclaimed Mr. Walthew, with a sneer. “Well, well, I have no time to argue with you, Henry; my time is precious, so may I ask how you propose to fill yours now? You have tried and failed for the City; you have tried and failed for the Law; and now you have tried schoolmastering, and failed still more conspicuously. What do you think of trying next?”
“Something that I have been trying for some time without failing so badly as at the other things.”
“Literature!” cried Mrs. Ringrose.
“Literature, forsooth!” echoed the clergyman, before Harry had time to repudiate the word. “I suppose, Mary, that you are alluding to the productions you have shown me in the paper with the unspeakable name? Well, Henry, if that’s your literature, let’s say no more about it; only I am almost sorry you did not fail there, too. You cannot, however, devote all or even much of your time to such buffoonery, and it was to speak to you about some permanent occupation that I accompanied your mother this afternoon. What should you say to the Civil Service?”
“I couldn’t possibly get into it, uncle.”
“Into the higher branches you certainly could not, Henry. But a second-class clerkship in one of the lower branches I think you might obtain, with ordinary application and perseverance. I am only sorry it did not occur to me before.”
“What are the lower branches?” asked Harry, doubtfully.
“The Excise and the Customs are two.”
“And the salary?”
“From eighty-five to two hundred pounds in the Excise, which is the service I recommend. I have been making inquiries about it this morning. A parishioner of mine is sending his son in for it. The lad is to attend classes at Exeter Hall, under the auspices of the Young Men’s Christian Association, and I understand that mensuration is the only really difficult subject. What I propose to do, Henry, is to present you to-morrow with a ticket for the course of these classes which commences next week.”
“You are very kind, Uncle Spencer — —”
Mr. Walthew waved his hand as though not totally unaware of it.
“But — —”
“But what?” cried Uncle Spencer.
“I believe before very, very long I should make as much money with my pen.”
“You decline my offer?”
“I am exceedingly grateful for it.”
“Yet you elect to go on writing rubbish for an extremely vulgar paper for the rest of your days.”
“Not for the rest of my days, I hope, Uncle Spencer. I mean it to be a stepping-stone to better things.”
“So you think you can earn eighty-five pounds a year by your pen!” sneered the clergyman, buttoning up his overcoat.
“I mean to try,” said Harry, provoked into a firmer tone.
“Is this your deliberate decision?”
“It is.”
“Then I am sorry I wasted my time by coming so far to hold out a helping hand to you. It is the last time, Henry. You may go your own way after this. Only, when your pen brings you to the poorhouse, don’t come to me — that’s all!”
Harry contrived to keep his temper without effort. Pinpricks do not hurt a man with a mortal wound. As for Mrs. Ringrose, she had fled before the proposal which she knew was coming, and of the result of which she felt equally sure. But she came to her door to bid the offended clergyman good-bye, and at last her boy and she were alone. He flung his arms round her neck.
“I am never going to leave you again!” he cried passionately. “I am not going to look for any more work. I am going to stop at home and write for T.T. until I can teach myself to write something better. I am going to work for you and for us both. I am going to do my work beside you, and you’re going to help me.
We ought never to have separated. Nothing shall ever separate us again!”
“Until you marry,” murmured Mrs. Ringrose.
“I will never marry!” cried her boy.
CHAPTER XXIV.
YOUNG INK.
So it was that Harry Ringrose took finally to his pen towards the close of the most momentous year of his existence; for four years from that date there was but one sort of dramatic interest in his life. There was the dramatic interest of the electric bell; and that was all.
In the early days, when the roll of the little steel drum broke a silence or cut short a speech, the eyes of mother and son would meet involuntarily with the same look. Her needles would cease clicking. His pen would spring from the unfinished word. Each had the other’s thought, and neither uttered it. Many a man had fled the country in his panic, to pluck up courage and return in his cooler senses. Many a man effaced himself for a time, but few for ever. The ironmaster’s last letter confessed flight and promised self-effacement. He might have thought better of it — that might be he at the bell. One of the two within got over this feeling in time; the other never did.
The dogged plodder at the desk endured other heartburnings of which the little steel drum beat the signal. Knockers these flats had not, and the postman usually rang a second before he thrust the letter through the door. It was a breathless second for Harry Ringrose. He developed an incredibly fine ear for what came through. He was never deceived in the thud of a rejected manuscript. He used to vow that a proof fell with peculiar softness, and, later, that a press-cutting was unmistakable because you could not hear it fall. He had an essay on the subject in his second book, published when he was twenty-five.
His first book had been one of the minor successes of its season. It had made a small, a very small, name for Harry, but had developed his character more than his fame. It is an ominous coincidence, however, that in conception his first book was as barefaced and as cold-blooded as his first verses in Uncle Tom’s Magazine.
For nearly three years he had been writing up, for as many guineas as possible, those African anecdotes which he had brought home with him for conversational purposes. In this way he had wasted much excellent material, to which, however, he was not too proud to return when he knew better. Heaven knows how many times he used the lion in the moonlight and his friend the Portuguese murderer of Zambesi blacks. One would have thought — he thought himself — that he had squeezed the last drop from his African orange, when one fine day he saw the way to make the pulp pay better than the juice. It was not his own way. It was the way of the greatest humorist then living. Harry took the whole of his two years abroad, and eyed them afresh from that humorist’s point of view, as he apprehended it. He saw the things the great man would have seized upon, and the way it seemed to Harry he would have treated them. The result was a comic lion in the moonlight, and a more or less amusing murderer. He had treated these things tragically hitherto.
Complete Works of E W Hornung Page 148