by Ellen Wood
“Me boy, there’s only one thing I can do for ye just now,” he said after silently turning the matter about in all its bearings, and hearing the explanation of the Poplar project. “Ye know I must be off tomorrow by the early French steamer, and I can’t go about looking after places to-day, even if I knew where they could be picked up, which I don’t. I must leave ye to Greatorex and Greatorex.”
“What will they do?” asked Roland.
“You can come along with me there, and see.” Accordingly, when the Earl of Carrick went forth to his appointed interview that day with Mr. Greatorex, he presented Roland; and simply told the old lawyer that he must put him in a way of getting along, until he, Lord Carrick, was in funds again. Candid and open as ever Roland could be, the Earl made no secret whatever of that gentleman’s penniless state, enlarging on the fact that to go dinnerless, as a rule, could not be good for him, and that he should not exactly like to see him set up as a hot-pie man in Poplar. Mr. Greatorex, perhaps nearly as much taken to as Sir Richard Yorke had been on a similar occasion, glanced at his son Bede who was present, and hesitated. He did not refuse point blank — as he might have done by almost anybody else. Lord Carrick was a valuable client, his business yearly bringing in a good share of feathers to the Greatorex nest, and old Mr. Greatorex was sensible of the fact. Still, he did not see what he could do for one who, like Roland, was in the somewhat anomalous position of being nephew to an earl and a baronet, but reduced to contemplate the embarking in the hot-pie trade.
“We might give him a stool in our office, Lord Carrick, for it happens that we are a clerk short: and pay him — pay him — twenty shillings a week. As a temporary thing, of course.”
To one who had not had a dinner for days, twenty shillings a week seems an ample fortune; and Roland started up and grasped the elder lawyer’s hand.
“I’ll earn it,” he said, his tone and eyes alike beaming with gratitude. “I’ll work for you till I drop.” Mr. Greatorex smiled. “The work will not be difficult, Mr. Yorke; writing, and going on errands occasionally. If you do come,” he pointedly added, “you must be ready to perform anything you may be directed to do, just as a regular clerk does.”
“Ready and willing too,” responded Roland.
“We have room for a certain number of clerks only,” proceeded Mr. Greatorex, who was desirous that there should be no misunderstanding in the bargain; “each one has his appointed work and must get through it. Can you copy deeds?”
“Can’t I,” unceremoniously replied Roland. “I was nearly worked to death with old Galloway, of Helstonleigh.”
“Were you ever with him?” cried Mr. Greatorex in surprise, to whom Mr. Galloway was known.
“Yes, for years; and part of the time had all the care of the office on my shoulders,” was Roland’s ready answer. “There was only Galloway then, beside myself, and he was not good for much. Why! the amount of copying I had to do was so great, I thought I should have (hopped into my grave. Lord Carrick knows it.”
Lord Carrick did, in so far as that he had heard Roland repeatedly assert it, and nodded assent. Mr. Greatorex thought the services of so experienced a clerk must be invaluable to any house, and felt charmed to have secured them.
And that is how it arose that Roland Yorke, as you have seen, was entering the office of Greatorex and Greatorex. He was to be a clerk there to all intents and purposes; just as he had been in the old days at Mr. Galloway’s; and yet, when he came in that morning, after his summerset out of the hansom cab, with a five-pound note in his pocket that Lord Carrick had contrived to spare for him, and an order for unlimited credit at his lordship’s tailor’s, hatter’s, and bootmaker’s, Roland’s buoyant heart and fate were alike radiant, as if he had suddenly come into a fortune.
CHAPTER IX.
Unexpected Meetings.
“You can go to your dinner, Mr. Yorke.”
The clocks were striking one, as Brown, the manager, gave the semi-order. Roland, to whom dinner was an agreeable interlude, especially under the circumstances of having money in his pocket to pay for it, leaped off his stool forthwith, and caught up his hat.
“Are you not coming, Hurst?”
Mr. Hurst shook his head. “Little Jenner goes now. I stay until he comes back.”
Little Jenner had been making preparation to go of his own accord, brushing his hat, drawing down his waistcoat, pushing gingerly in order his mass of soft fair hair. He was remarkably small; and these very small men are often very great dandies. Roland, who had shaken off the old pride in his rubs with the world, waited for him outside.
“Jenner, d’ye know of a good dining-place about here?” he asked, as they stood together, looking like a giant and a dwarf.
The clerk hesitated whether to say he did or did not. The place that he considered good might not appear so to the nephew of Sir Richard Yorke.
“I generally go to a house in Tottenham Court Road, sir. It’s a kind of cook’s shop, clean, and the meat excellent; but one sees all kinds of people there, and you may not think it up to you.”
“Law, bless you!” cried Roland. “When a fellow has been knocked about for four years in the streets of Port Natal, he doesn’t retain much ceremony. Let’s get on to it. Do you know of any lodgings to be let in these parts, Jenner?” he continued again. “I shall get some as near to Greatorex’s as I can. One does not want a three or four miles’ dance night and morning.”
Jenner said he did not know of any, but would help Mr. Yorke to look for some that evening if he liked. And they had turned into Tottenham Court Road, when Jenner halted to speak to some one he encountered: a little woman, very dark, who was bustling by with a black and white flat basket in her hand.
“How d’ye do, Mrs. Jones? How’s Mr. Ollivera?”
“Now, I’ve not got the time to stand bothering with you, Jenner,” was the tart retort. “Call in any evening you like, as I’ve told you before; but I’m up to my eyes in errands now.”
Roland Yorke, whose attention had been attracted to something in a shop-window, wheeled round on his heel at the voice, and stared at the speaker. Jenner had called her Mrs. Jones; but Roland fully believed no person in the world could own that voice, save one. A voice that struck on every chord of his memory, as connected with Helstonleigh.
“It is Mrs. Jenkins!” cried Roland, seizing the stranger’s hands. “What on earth does he mean by calling you Mrs. Jones?”
“Ah,” she groaned, “I am Mrs. Jones, more’s the shame and pity. Let it pass for now, young Mr. Yorke. I should have known you anywhere.”
“You don’t mean to say you are living in London?” returned Roland.
“Yes, I am. In Gower Street. Come and see me, Mr. Yorke; Jenner will show you the house. Did you make your fortune at Port Natal? You’d always used to be telling Jenkins, you know, that you should.”
“And I thought I should,” said Roland, with emphasis; “but I got no luck, and it turned out a failure. Won’t I come and see you! I say, Mrs. Jenkins, do you remember the toasted muffins that Jenkins wouldn’t eat?”
Mrs. Jones nodded twice to the reminiscence. She went bustling on her way, and they on theirs. Roland for once was rather silent. Mingling with the satisfaction he experienced in meeting any one from Helstonleigh, especially one so associated with the old familiar daily life as Mrs. Jenkins had been, came the thoughts of the years since; of the defeats and failures; of the mortification that invariably lay on his heart when he had to tell of them and of what they had brought him. He had now met two of the old people in one day; Hurst and Mrs. Jones; or, as Roland still called her, Mrs. Jenkins. Cords would not have dragged Roland to Helstonleigh: his mother, with the rest of them at home, had come over to Ireland to stay part of the summer at Lord Carrick’s, soon after Roland’s return from Port Natal; but he would not go to see them at the old home city. With the exception of scraps of news learnt from Hurst that day, Roland knew nothing about Helstonleigh’s later years.
“Look here, Jen
ner! What brings her name Jones? It used to be Jenkins.”
“I think I have heard that it was Jenkins once,” replied Jenner, reflectively. “She must have married Jones after Jenkins died. Did you know him?”
“Did I know him?” echoed Roland, to whom the question sounded a very superfluous one. “I should just think I did know him. Why, he was chief clerk for years to Galloway, that cantankerous old proctor I was with. Jenkins was a good fellow as ever lived, meek and patient, and of course Mrs. J. put upon him. She’d not allow him to have his will in the smallest way: he couldn’t dress himself in a morning unless she chose to let him. Which she didn’t always.”
“Not let him dress himself?”
“It’s true,” affirmed Roland, diving down into the depth of the old grievances. “Our office was in an awful state of work at that time; and because Jenkins had a cough she’d lock up his pantaloons to keep him at home. It wasn’t his fault; he’d have come in his coffin. Jones, whoever he may be, must have had the courage of a wolf to venture on her. Does he look like one?”
“I never saw him,” said Jenner. “I think he’s dead, too.”
“Couldn’t stand it, I suppose? My opinion is, it was her tongue took off poor Jenkins. He was mild as honey. Not that she’s a bad lot at bottom, mind you, Jenner. I wonder what brought her to London?”
“I don’t know anything about her affairs,” said Jenner. “The Rev. Henry William Ollivera has his rooms in her house. And I go to see him now and then. That’s all.”
“Who is the Rev. William Ollivera?”
“Curate of a parish hard by. His brother, a barrister, had chambers in Lincoln’s Inn, and I was his clerk. Four years ago he went the Oxford circuit, and came to his death at Helstonleigh. It was a shocking affair, and happened in the Joneses’ house. They lived at Helstonleigh then. Mrs. Jones’s sister went in one morning and found him dead in his chair.”
“My goodness!” cried Roland. “Was it a fit?”
“Worse than that. He took away his own life. And I have never been able to understand it from that hour to this, for he was the most unlikely man living to do such a thing — as people all said. The Greatorexes interested themselves to get me a fresh place, giving me some temporary work in their office. It ended in my remaining with them. They find me useful, and pay me well. It’s four years now, sir, since it happened.”
“Just one year before I got home from Natal,” casually remarked Roland.
“He sends for me sometimes,” continued Mr. Jenner, pursuing his own thoughts, which were running on the clergyman. “When any fresh idea occurs to him, he’ll write off for me, post haste; and when I get there he puts all sorts of questions to me, about the old times in Lincoln’s Inn. You see, he has always held that Mr. Ollivera did not kill himself, and has been ever since trying to get evidence to prove he did not. The hope never seems to grow old with him, or to rest; it is as fresh and near as it was the day he first took it up.”
Roland felt a little puzzled. “Did Mr. Ollivera kill himself, or didn’t he? Which do you mean?” Jenner shook his head. “I think he did, unlikely though it seemed. All the circumstances proved it, and nobody doubted it except the Rev. Mr. Ollivera. Bede Greatorex, who was the last person to see him alive, thinks there can be no doubt whatever; I overheard him say it was just one of William Ollivera’s crotchets, and not the first by a good many that he had taken up. The clergyman used to be for ever coming into the office talking of it, saying should he do this or do the other, until Bede told him he couldn’t have it; that it interrupted business.”
“What has Bede Greatorex to do with it? Why should Ollivera come to him?”
“Bede Greatorex has nearly as much to do with it as the clergyman. He and the two Olliveras were cousins. Bede Greatorex was awfully cut at the death: he’d be glad to see that there was doubt attending it; but he, as a sensible man, can’t see it. They buried Mr. Ollivera like a dog.”
“What did they do that for?”
“The verdict was felo-de-se. Mr. Hurst can tell you all about it, sir; he was at Helstonleigh at the time: he says he never saw such a scene in his life as the funeral. It was a moonlight night, and half the town was there.”
“I’ll get it all out of him,” quoth Roland, who had not lost in the smallest degree his propensity to indulge in desultory gossip.
“Don’t ask him in the office,” advised Jenner. “Brown would stop you at the first word. He never let’s a syllable be dropped upon the subject. I asked him one day what it was to him, and he answered that it was not seemly to allude to the affair in the house, as Mr. Ollivera had been a connection of it. My fancy is that Brown must have known something of it at the time, and does not like it mentioned on his own score,” confidentially added little Jenner, who was of a shrewd turn. “I saw him change colour once over it.”
“Who is Brown?” questioned Roland.
“That’s more than I can say,” was the reply. “He’s an uncommonly efficient clerk; but, once out of the office, he keeps himself to himself, and makes friends with none of us. Here we are, sir.”
The eating-house, however unsuitable it might have been to one holding his own as the nephew of an English baronet, to say nothing of an Irish peer, was welcome as sun in harvest to hungry Roland. He ordered a magnificent dinner, off-hand: three plates of meat each, three of tart; vegetables, bread and beer ad libitum: paid for the whole, changing his five-pound note, and gave a shilling to the man who waited on them. Little Jenner went out with his face shining.
“We must make the best of our way back, Mr. Yorke. Time’s up.”
“Oh, is it, though,” cried Roland. “I’m not going back yet. I shall take a turn round to see Mrs. Jenkins; there are five hundred things I want to ask her.”
One can only be civil to a man who has just treated one to a good dinner, and Jenner did not like to tell Roland point-blank that he had better not go anywhere but to the office.
“They are awfully strict about time in our place,” cried he; “and we are busy just now. I must make haste back, sir.”
“All right,” said easy Roland. “Say I am coming.”
His long legs went flying off in the direction of Gower Street, Jenner having given him the necessary instructions to find it; and he burst clattering in upon Mrs. Jones in her sitting-room without the least ceremony, very much as he used to do in the old days when she was Mrs. Jenkins. Mrs. Jones had been for. some time now given to wish that she had not changed her name. Doing very well as the widow Jenkins, years ago, in her little hosier’s shop in High Street, Helstonleigh, what was her mortification to find one day that the large and handsome house next door, with its shop-windows of plate-glass, had been opened as another hosier’s by a Mr. Richard Jones. Would customers continue to come to her plain and unpretending mart, when that new one, grand, imposing, and telling of an unlimited stock within, was staring them in the face? The widow Jenkins feared not; and fretted herself to fiddle-strings.
The fear might have had no cause of foundation: the show kept up at the adjoining house was perhaps founded on artificial bases, rather than real. Richard Jones (whom the city had already begun to designate as Dicky) turned out to be of a sociable nature; he made her acquaintance whether she would or no, and suddenly proposed to her to unite the two businesses in one, by making herself, and her stock, and her connection, over to him. Mrs. Jenkins’s first impulse was to throw at his head the nearest parcel that came to hand. Familiarity with an idea, however, sometimes reconciles the worst adversary; as at length it did Mrs. Jenkins to this. To give her her due, she took no account whatever of Mr. Jones in the matter; he went for nothing, a bale of waste flung in to make weight, she should rule him just as she had ruled Jenkins; her sole temptation was the flourishing shop, à côté, and the good, well-furnished house. So Mrs. Jenkins exchanged her name for that of Jones, and removed, bag and baggage; resigning the inferior home that had so long sheltered her. It was close upon this, that one of the barristers, comin
g in to the summer assizes at Helstonleigh, took apartments at Mrs. Jones’s. That was Mr. Ollivera: and in the following March, when he again came in, occurred his tragical ending.
Before this, long before it, Mrs. Jones had grown to realize to herself the truth of the homely proverb, All’s not gold that glitters. Mr. Jones’s connection did not prove to be of the most extensive kind; far from it; the large, imposing stock turned out to be three parts dummies; and she grew to believe — to see — that his motive in marrying her was to uphold his newly-established business by beguiling to it her old customers. The knowledge did not tend to soothe her naturally tart temper; neither did the fact that her husband took a vast deal of pleasure abroad, spent money recklessly, and left her to do all the work. Mr. Jones’s debts came out, one after the other; more than could be paid; and one morning some men of the law walked quietly in, and put themselves in possession of the effects. Things had come to a crisis. Mr. Jones, after battling out affairs with the bankruptcy commissioner, started for America; his wife went off to London. Certain money, her own past savings, she had been wise enough to have secured to her separate special use, and that could not be touched. With a portion of it she bought in some of the furniture, and set up as a letter of lodgings in Gower Street.
But that Roland Yorke had not seen the parlour at Helstonleigh (which the reader had the satisfaction of once entering with Mr. Butterby), he would have gone well nigh to think this the same room. The red carpet on the floor, the small book-shelves, the mahogany sideboard with its array of glasses, the horse-hair chairs, the red cloth on the centre table, all had been transplanted. When Roland bustled in, he found Mrs. Jones knitting away at lambs’-wool socks, as if for her life. In the intervals of her home occupation, or when her house was slack of lodgers, she did these for sale, and realized a very fair profit.