The Son of His Father; vol. 2/3

‘You have never unpacked your things,’ she said. ‘Give me your keys, and I will do what I can, though it is too late to do much to-night. If you had stayed in, and unpacked your things, then we should have had such a pleasant evening together. I came over as soon as I could get away, and, oh! how disappointed I was to find you gone. But never mind. You did not think of that—how should you? Perhaps you had forgotten Susie altogether, you were so little when you went away.’

‘Why was I sent away? It would have been better, far better never to have parted,’ said John; and then he added, ‘I never forgot you, Susie. I think you haven’t changed much. I remember you all this time. You stood at the door and cried when I went away.’

‘And many, many a time after,’ she said, looking up, with tears in her eyes. ‘Oh, many a time; I missed you so. Oh, Johnnie, perhaps you are right. We should have known all the things to guard against, while grandfather and grandmother——’

‘No,’ said John. ‘I am wrong; it would not have been better. They were happier to have me. I am glad they had a child till their death to love them, not one like Emily, but me——’

He stood up, looking not like the boy she thought him, but like a young, indignant angel, with his head raised and his nostrils quivering. Susan took the woman’s part. She began to wonder at and admire him, and to feel herself in the wrong, as indeed she was.

CHAPTER IV.

ON HIS TRIAL.

Mrs. Sandford raised her eyes to her daughter, interrupting her work for a moment. She had a great deal of work. To be matron of a great hospital is no easy thing, and there were arrears besides to make up. She had been at work half the night, and had not heard at what hour Susie had stolen in. Now she looked up with an expression which made her stern face for a moment gentle.

‘It is true,’ she said; ‘you have not changed. I think better of him for perceiving that.’

‘You must think well of him, mother. He is a good, kind boy. He had an accident last night saving a child. It was nearly killed under a carriage, and he rushed in and saved it. But he did not escape scot-free. He has got a cut on his head, but it is not much. I looked at it: you need not be anxious.’

This Susie repeated very quickly, like a lesson, hurrying the sentences upon each other, lest her mother should interrupt her before all was said.

‘An accident—a cut on the face—but not anything much. Susie, what are you telling me—already? He went out, then, last night?’

‘Yes, he went out. Why shouldn’t he? He’s so young, and his first night in London. It isn’t at all exciting to us; but think what it would be to a boy who had never been here before.’

‘You are accusing him before I attack him, Susie. The first night! I didn’t even think of warning him not to go out. I thought him all safe the first night. Oh me, oh me, has it begun already?—what I’ve trembled for all his life!’

‘No, no,’ cried Susie with her anxious voice. ‘I’m sure it’s not that. He went out, to be sure. Fancy, at his age, to be in London, and without anyone to talk to, and not to go out. The parents of the child were very good to him, and had his head plastered up. It was very well done too,’ said Susie, with professional approbation. ‘For my part, I was quite happy to hear that he had saved the child.’

Mrs. Sandford shook her head. She turned back to her books again; then pushed them aside, and put up her hands to her head.

‘Oh! Susie,’ she cried, ‘I knew how it would be. He is your father all over. All his ways are his ways. I thought he was safe down in the quiet country with the old people. If they had lived, I should never have wished him to know anything of you or me. What can we do for him? We can’t even have him in the house with us. Oh, how foolish I was to bring him to London! I might have paid some one down there to take care of him—to keep him out of evil.’

‘Mother, you know that could not be. Don’t you remember how many talks we used to have about it? You can’t keep a boy of his age so. He is almost a man; and, mother, he looks like a man sometimes: when he rose up in indignation against me, because I—because I——’

‘You thought so too? Don’t conceal it from me, Susie. You saw him come in—with all this story about an accident—the very first night. I knew it was in him, his father’s son: and my poor father and mother with all their innocent tales about him; how good he was; never a suspicion, not a weakness of any kind. Oh, why did they die? Why did I bring him away from the country? And why, why is it permitted that this poison should come into a young boy’s veins, from a father he scarcely knew!’

‘Oh, mother, wait till you see; don’t condemn him unheard.’

‘Condemn him! Would I condemn him? My heart bleeds for him, Susie; but I see all the tortures that are in store for us: and for him it would have been better if he never had been born. For what can we do for him, you and I?’

‘Oh, mother, it is not so bad as that; it may never be so bad!’ Susie said, with tears.

Mrs. Sandford shook her head. She drew to her the books with which she had been busy, and resumed her work. After all, whatever happened, that had to be done. There was nothing in the world except work, in which there was any satisfaction. This was the conclusion she had come to long ago. It was morning, a little before the time when John was to have his audience, and this was how it was prepared. The table was covered with books, reports, accounts, all the records of her occupation, which had fallen into arrears during that forced leave she had been obliged to apply for, to bury her father. The room was very lofty for its size, somewhat barely furnished, with enormous windows and the fullest blaze of daylight, not a line or a corner of shadow anywhere. It was fitted with great cupboards full of stores—and constant use, constant business, was visible in every arrangement. There was nothing for grace or ornament, and not much for comfort—a place not so much to live in as to work in; but this was suitable to a life which was all work. When she resumed her examination of the books, Susie withdrew to a corner, where there was a little table and needlework, her own little place in this chamber and temple of labour. It was not pretty work with which she was occupied. She was making flannel bandages or belts, hemming down the rough edges, rolling them neatly up, ready for use. Susie had grown up in this atmosphere, and knew no other. She had gone through all a nurse’s training, though she had not taken up that profession. When a more tender hand than ordinary was wanted where all were tender, she was called to help. She was always at hand when the strength of the nursing sister was overtaxed. But still she had her own little separate place as the matron’s daughter, a sort of lay element where all were professional. She wore a sort of modified version of their severe black and white dress. Susie’s dress was black too, with white collar and cuffs, but these had sometimes a line of ornament, and she wore a ribbon at her throat, a locket, a bracelet, a few slight marks that she was not under the rule. She was twenty-two, very modest and quiet, sometimes looking older than her age, yet sometimes also looking infantine in the fulness of a life that knew no distractions, nothing but the hospital, the service of others. She was not strictly pretty. Her hair was brown, her eyes brown like most people’s, her complexion generally pale, with a little colour coming and going, nothing in her to be remarked at the first glance, no beauty—but to those who knew her a certain charm, tranquil and pure, the beauty of a spirit absolutely free from any pre-occupations of its own. There are very few people in the world of whom so much can be said, and perhaps their perfection in this moral way means a deficiency in some others, a want of imagination, even a defective vitality: but the human race is not likely to err so, and the occasional examples to be met with in the world are always wonderful, to those who can believe in them. Susie, as was natural, was very imperfectly known by those about her. She was, everybody allowed, very good, but how far her goodness went beyond the surface, or whether it was not partially seeming, or if there might not be a certain sense of self-interest in being so good (for to be sure, in the atmosphere in which she had been brought up, goodness is the best policy), was a point sometimes discussed in the hospital, where, as in other places, it was a little difficult to realise that heavenly form of character. People thought, even when they had no doubt of her, that so much goodness was uninteresting, and that they would have liked her better with a few more faults, which probably was quite true.

But Susie’s tranquil spirit was in much commotion this morning. She had slept little all night, and thought much. Susie was well aware of the tragedy of the family life. There were no secrets in it from her. And she had been brought up in the belief that the cloud of hereditary evil was so strong upon her brother, that to keep him in ignorance—to keep him if possible at a distance, where he could never know anything of the antecedents of his family—was the best thing for him. It did not occur to her that she herself was her father’s daughter, as much as John was his son, and that, if the hereditary principle was true, she ought to have shared her brother’s danger. This view of the subject was dismissed by the fact that she was a girl, and therefore her mother’s child, an opinion very fallacious, and not to be maintained for a moment, either by logic, reason, or experience. But, in spite of all these qualifying things, a foregone conclusion will always hold its place. She, it was felt, was in no danger, though she knew everything; but John, the boy! For him it was expedient that all precautions should be taken, with him there was a kind of miserable certainty that safeguards would fail.

This was the persuasion in which she had been brought up. And it is impossible to tell what horror and misery the girl had gone through, waiting for her young brother’s return on his first night in London. She had been waiting a long time, and she had gone over in her own mind all the dismal expectations which an anxious woman, bitterly acquainted with one form of dissipation, can turn over in the dreadful suspense of a long evening spent in watching for the return of one who comes not, and whose absence can be accounted for only by some catastrophe. A world of old recollections had come rolling up before her distracted eyes. She had seen him reeling along the street, stumbling in, with wild eyes and a stammering voice, with all the miserable signs upon him of that vice which, in its beginnings at least, is no sin, means no harm, and yet is the most degrading and destructive of all vices. No words can tell the tortures which a woman goes through, to whom such vigils are habitual. They were perhaps even more terrible now by being purely imaginary. For fact, however frightful, brings into action all the subtle forces of mercy, the attempts to account for and excuse, the natural yearnings of the heart over the sinner: whereas in imagination there is no alleviation, and the first fall carries with it a tragic prophecy of utter destruction. When John had appeared, with his paleness, with the lingering traces of that exhilaration which Montressor’s drink had left still in his eyes, and with the cut showing under his disordered hair, Susie had felt for a moment as if all were over, and the tragic conclusion, so long foreseen, coming to pass before her eyes.

But, presently, that subduing presence of reality began to tell upon her, and though it was hard to shake off the sway of the anticipated, and hard to realise that the story of the supposed sinner was not a gloss of excuse, yet by-and-by her mind had changed. She had not been quite convinced up to the moment of quitting him; for Montressor’s drink had left a fatal odour, and there was a certain excitement in the boy’s manner and address: but as she lay on her bed, in the dark, and went over and over everything that had passed, Susie’s attitude changed. I will not assert that the foreseen and expected were so far vanquished in her, that she had a calm and steady belief in her brother. Not that; but a passionate partisanship sprang up in her mind. Another conclusion rose up and did battle with the first. It had seemed miserably certain that he would err before. It seemed impossible but that he must overcome now. She went over every fact of the previous night, and explained it away to herself as she lay gazing at the dawning light. She made up by degrees a picture in every way favourable—an ideal figure, an image full of generosity, tenderness, and help. She seemed to see him flinging himself, a heroic young deliverer, among the crowding carriages; probably they had poured a little brandy down his throat to bring him to himself (for Susie had not advanced far enough in the new way to understand how in all innocence, though quite voluntarily and cheerfully, John might have swallowed Montressor’s potion), and then what so natural as that, a stranger, he had lost his way? He did not know that she or anyone was waiting for him, or that he should find a friendly voice, anyone with whom he could exchange a word when he got back. Why should he have hastened back? There was no reason for it. And to think that on his first evening in London he had saved a life! If the excitement of it brought a little tremor upon him, who could wonder? Had she seen it only, what with alarm and pride, and happiness and delight, Susie felt that she would have trembled for hours. He would not have been human if he had not felt it. And the brandy must have been given to bring him to himself. He was not aware, how should he be, of the degrading suspicions in her mind, and so did not explain that. But no doubt that was how it was. She rose up in the morning, having slept very little, still thrilling with the anxiety, the relief, and the pain— John’s partisan and advocate. She would have been so more or less, in any circumstances. She was so with her whole heart now.

John came in shortly after, a little later than the appointed hour. He came with a sense that he was on his defence, or at least was on the defensive, an almost more oppressive sensation: for except that he was distrusted, and all his doings regarded with an unfavourable eye, he did not know any more, neither what form the doubts and suspicions took, nor what reason there was in them. He came reluctantly, with nothing of the feeling with which a youth of his age, conscious of no wrong, should go to his mother; no trust in her kindness, no confidence that she would see anything which concerned him in a good light. And the very place, the great institution, which chilled and disheartened him with its atmosphere of professional business, added to this intuitive reluctance. It was the home of Christian charity and kindness; it was the place in which devoted men and women gave up their lives to the solace of the suffering, to save lives and alleviate pain. Many a poor creature had found ease and succour and the tenderest help in it. But yet to John it was cold, sending a chill to his very heart; the great space, the stony stairs and passages, the universal pre-occupation were all so destructive to the idea of anything that could be called a home. People might live there no doubt, did live there when they were compelled by illness, or by duty for the help of those who were ill, but to dwell under that vast roof which covered so much suffering, how was that possible? And She had no other home, and this was the only place in the world to which he had any natural right to come.

Home in a hospital! to him who had known what a natural home was, a place you live in with your own, possessing it to yourself, a secure shelter and refuge, what a chilly public place it was! He followed the porter of the hospital, who guided him up the bare stairs and pointed out the way to the matron’s rooms at the end of the long, lofty bare corridor, with a heart full of reluctance and disagreeable anticipations. He felt sure of being disapproved of, though he did not know what he had done that was wrong, and great discouragement and despondency, and a sense of injustice and an impulse of resistance filled his mind. It was not like a son going to his mother’s room, or a youth without a home to the centre of domestic warmth and protection, but like a clerk, or official messenger on business, that he knocked at the door pointed out to him. He was told to ‘Come in’ just as the messenger on business might have been told, and went in, and lingered for a moment by the door, struck by the strange impressiveness of the place; the great stream of unshadowed daylight, the height of the walls, too high for decoration, the furniture no more than necessity required, the large writing-table in the middle of the room, laden with books and papers. Mrs. Sandford, after her conversation with Susie, which had agitated her in spite of herself, had returned again to her work with more than ordinary absorption in it, and put up her hand to warn the new-comer against interrupting her in the midst of a calculation. John’s heart burned within him at this strange welcome. He stood for a moment undecided. It occurred to him, with a flash of resolution, that he would turn and go, cutting this bond, which was one of mere conventional connection, and, rushing forth, make his way as he could alone in the world.

He was stopped in this sudden gleam of half-formed intention by a soft touch upon his arm, and a still softer touch on his cheek, and found Susie standing by him, whom he had not seen on coming in, looking at him with a tender interest and pride.

‘I did not see you right, last night,’ she said, ‘Johnnie dear. There was no light. Let me look at you now.’

‘There is not very much to see, Susie.’

‘Oh, there is a great deal to see: my little brother that I have never stopped thinking of all my life—and just like what I thought; but you are not my little brother now. Mother, here is John.’

Mrs. Sandford laid down her pen and held out her hand.

‘If I had lost the thread of that account, I should never have found it again,’ she said. ‘My work is in such arrear. How are you this morning, John? Let us see this place on your forehead.’

‘It is nothing,’ he said, with a flush of colour.

‘I must see that for myself,’ she said, rising up, and taking his head in her hands. Other feelings came into John’s heart as he felt those hands, with their skilful touch, putting aside his hair, examining his wound. She let him go in a few moments, with a slight pat which was almost a caress. It was what she would have done to any young patient, but this he did not know. ‘It is, as Susie said, nothing to be uneasy about. If it does not heal in a day or two, we must get Mr. Denton or Mr. Colville to look at it. But I think it will heal of itself. It would have been more prudent, John, to remain at home instead of seeking adventures in the streets the first night.’

‘It didn’t look much like home,’ he said.

‘No; but it would, if you had waited for Susie. She is very like home even here. We cannot make a home for you, unhappily. The only thing for it, failing that, is to find you something to do.’

‘That is what I desire most,’ he said. She had seated herself again, returning to her books, and was looking at him with the air of one who has but a short time to spare for any other interest. Her eyes glanced from him to the long lines of figures she had before her. ‘Couldn’t I do some of that for you?’ said John, with a sudden impulse.

Mrs. Sandford started, and looked at him with astonished eyes.

‘My work?’ she said, ‘do you think you could do my work?’

‘If it is only adding up figures, surely,’ said John.

This time she let her eyes dwell on him a little longer, with a momentary smile, but more of wonder at his audacity than pleasure.

‘That was well meant,’ she said; ‘it was well meant. Susie, I think you can be spared to-day. You might go out with him, and show him something. It is natural that he should want to see something: and I shall have more time this evening to tell him what I have settled. I have heard of an engineer’s in which you can begin work. But you must take a holiday to-day. Susie will get her hat, and be ready at once. You will like that I suppose?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

Susie withdrew quickly, her face brightening, and John stood, watching his mother, who let her eye wander over her figures, then recovered herself with a glance towards him, in which he could read impatience restrained, and a desire that he should be gone. It was this, perhaps, that inspired him with the question, which a moment before he had never dreamed of putting to her.

‘Will you tell me,’ he said, ‘whether there was ever a Mr. Montressor who was a friend of my father’s?’ He asked this without knowing why.

She started, and the pen fell out of her hand. If it were possible to change from her natural paleness, he would have said she grew more pale. Against the merciless shining of the great window he could see her tremble, or at least so he thought. She did not say anything for a moment, and when she spoke her voice was somehow different.

‘I did not,’ she said, ‘know all your father’s friends; but it is a long time since all ended in that way. What do you know of any such friends?’

‘It is an uncommon name,’ said John.

‘Yes, it is an uncommon name. It is the sort of name that actors assume, and people of that kind. Ah, here is Susie, ready. Take your brother wherever you think he will like best to go. Don’t hurry. I shall not be anxious, as long as you are here in time for tea.’ She had risen with a sort of uneasy smile, and went with them to the door, touching Susie’s dress with her hand, smoothing down the little jacket she wore. When Susie had preceded her brother out of the room, Mrs. Sandford transferred her touch, nervously, quickly, to John’s arm. ‘Such people are no friends for you,’ she said, hastily. ‘Avoid them wherever you meet them. Avoid them! they are not friends for you.’

She had made no acknowledgment, and yet she had made more than an acknowledgment. The self-betrayal was instantaneous, but it was complete. Then it was his father of whom Montressor would not speak. Poor May! What had happened that he should be called Poor May!

CHAPTER V.

BROTHER AND SISTER.

‘How can you tell which is which?’ John cried, feeling the dust in his throat, the din in his ears, and his eyes growing red and hot with the flutter of the crowd, and of all the sights that flashed past him, and the smoke and suffocating atmosphere.

“Oh, I can’t tell. I only know,” said Susie.

She was at her ease in the midst of the commotion, looking as calm and as modest and composed as if she were walking in country lanes, not afraid of the thronged stations of the Metropolitan, the dingy platforms, the confusion of porters shouting, and doors clanging. John had meant to take care of his sister, but it was he who clung to her in the midst of the bewilderment and the noise. She knew which train to take, she knew when to change into another, where to stop; though to him they bore no distinction, neither the stations, the names of which he could never discover, nor the directions—for as yet, John was not even aware which was north or south, east or west.

Under Susie’s guidance, however, he saw and learnt a great deal in that first wonderful day. She took him from the Tower, to St. Paul’s, and then to the Abbey, to the Houses of Parliament—to the parks—as she was used to do with strangers, with convalescent patients sometimes, but that more gently—and with their relations and friends who would come up from the country to see somebody in the hospital, and then contemplate longingly the unknown world around them, till Susie, always kind, took pity on their ignorance. By this means she had been trained in the duties of cicerone, and was extremely efficient, knowing just enough and not too much: which is best—for a guide too erudite is a confusion to the simple mind.

She took her brother, in the middle of the day, to a modest place on the outskirts of the city, which she knew by this kind of excursion, to give him something to eat, and there pointed out to him what he found as interesting as anything—the young men and middle-aged men of all classes in pursuit of luncheon, crowding every kind of hotel and eating-house. It gave John altogether a new view of that busy life, where there is no time to go home for meals, but where everyone has comfortable means of being fed with no makeshifts or picnic arrangements, but a whole population toiling to supply the brief necessary repast. This, with all its immense supply and demand, and the sight of the men about the streets, plunging into, and being swallowed up in the high buildings which have replaced, in so many cases magnificently, the old shabby offices and chambers in which London laboured and grew rich, was as exciting to John, or perhaps more so, if the truth must be told, than the historical places to which Susie guided him. He was overawed by St. Paul’s, where he stood under the great dome, and heard the waves, so to speak, of the great sea of London dashing outside with a rhythmic force: and the venerable Abbey with all its records went to his heart. But for a youth of his day, standing eagerly upon the verge of life and longing to take part himself in all that was going on, the flood and pressure of men steadily pushing their way along the streets, all with some object or pursuit, pressing in crowds to snatch their hasty meal, pouring back again into every kind of office, in every possible capacity, that was to him the most interesting of all. Should he himself be like that in a day or two? Full of business, full of work, his mind all engaged with something outside of himself, no time to inquire into his own history, or discuss his relationships, or make himself wretched, perhaps, about things that might turn out of so little importance. This was the thought that took entire possession of his mind, as he went on.

‘Do you think you’ll like it, John?’

‘I don’t know if I’ll like it. That’s not what one wants to know—one wants to know how one is to get on.’

‘I should think,’ said Susie, hesitating a little, ‘I should think—that you are sure to get on, if you try.’

‘It shan’t be for the want of trying,’ said John.

‘Oh,’ cried Susie, ‘that is the thing we’ll think of most—that you should try, John. If you try your very best, and don’t succeed, it’s not your fault. That is what mother will think of, and I, too.’

‘But I mean to succeed,’ said John. Many have said it before him, and yet failed miserably. Yet each new aspirant means to win, and is as certain of his power to do so as those that went before. John’s purpose shone in his eyes, and his certainty communicated itself to his sister. She put her hand through his arm, giving him an affectionate pressure.

‘And oh, how I wish and pray you may! and believe it, too. Oh, John, with all my heart! That will do more for mother to heal her wounds than anything else in the world.’

Do more for mother! That was not what he was thinking of. He drew his arm away, perhaps somewhat coldly. The mother, who was Emily, had but few claims upon him. If Susie had said it for herself, if Elly had said it, that would have been a motive. He did not feel inspired by the one presented to him now. And there was a pause between them, and Susie saw that she had made a mistake, and that this was not the spell. They went on for some time after very soberly, without any question on John’s part or offer of information on the part of Susie, in a sort of heavy, dispirited way. At last she pressed his arm again, and said,

‘Oh, John, I wish you would have more feeling about mother. If you only knew what a life she has had, what a hard life! I can’t do much, one way or another. I can only stand by her, and do what I can to please her; but you, you are different. You can do so much. Oh, John!’

‘It is of no use. She does not believe that I will ever be good for anything; sometimes I think she—dislikes me, Susie.’

‘Oh, John, how can you say so, her own son, her only son! She has always thought of you, always; that I know.’

‘How has she thought of me? That I am sure to go wrong? I know,’ said John, with a sudden inspiration, ‘that is what she expects, that I must go wrong. She is always waiting to see me do it. I don’t know why, but I am sure it has always been in her mind.’

‘She didn’t know you, John,’ said Susie, eagerly, not seeing that she assented to his suggestion, ‘how could she know you? We had never seen you since you were a child; and if she thought——’

‘Why has she never seen me since I was a child?’ the boy asked, sternly. ‘Why is it I didn’t know you, Susie, my only sister, till now?’

‘Oh, as for that,’ said she, pressing his arm, ‘that didn’t matter, did it? You and I would always understand each other. It is only to say that you are John and I am Susie. We didn’t want any more.’

‘If sister and brother do that, shouldn’t mother and son do it?’ said John; ‘and we don’t, you see. She expects everything that is bad of me, and I think everything that is——’

‘No,’ she cried, ‘don’t say that; oh, John, don’t say that. It is all that you don’t know her. Wait a little, only wait a little. She has had a great deal to bear. She has had to put on what is almost a mask, to hide her heart which has been so wounded; oh, so wounded! John, you don’t know!’

‘Not by me,’ he said. ‘I have never done anything to her. But she has made up her mind that I shall turn out badly. Don’t contradict me, Susie, for I know.’

Susie made no attempt to contradict him. She patted his arm softly, and said, ‘Poor mother, poor mother,’ under her breath. John was not ill-pleased that she should take his mother’s part—it seemed suitable that she should do so, the thing that was becoming and natural. He did not want her to come over to his side. And then the mother was so wrong—so ridiculously, fantastically wrong, that some one to support and stand up for her was doubly necessary. Poor mother! who would not even have it in her power to be glad, as the commonest mother would be, when her son turned out the reverse of all she had feared.

‘If you would only forget,’ said Susie, ‘this notion you have taken into your mind, and go on (as I know you will go on) well, and make your way, mother will be beside herself with joy. Oh, it will make up for everything that is past, all she has had to bear; and there is nobody can do that but you.’

This appeal left John cold. He was thoroughly determined to go on well—by nature in the first place, for he felt no inclination for anything else. And if Susie had implored him for her own sake, or for Elly’s sake, he would have responded magnanimously, and promised everything she pleased—but for his mother, for the woman whose real name (if she only knew it) was Emily, how could that affect him? He made no reply, and presently their attention was diverted by some new thing which was strange to the country lad, and they discoursed on this subject no more. They had reached the Strand, the scene of John’s adventure of the previous night, when Susie suddenly dropped his arm very hastily, and with scarcely a word of explanation, bidding him wait for her, took refuge suddenly in a shop. He had not recovered from his surprise, when he was accosted by some one who came up with great cordiality, holding out his hand, and in whom John, with no small surprise, recognised his acquaintance, the father of the child he had rescued, the man who had been so grateful and enthusiastic in his thanks, Montressor, who hailed him with a heartiness that was almost noisy, shaking hands violently and protesting his delight.

‘Is it really you in the flesh, me dear young friend? And I’ve found ye, then, in daylight, and quite natural. You’re not the good fairy in the pantomime, nor yet the Red Cross Knight as me Nelly says ye are. And none the worse? I’m proud to see ye, young Mr. May.’

‘Oh,’ said John, ‘it’s nothing; indeed it’s nothing. I hope she is all right, and that she has taken no harm.’

‘She’s taken no harum, sir; but she’s a young creature of a highly nervous organisation, and her mother and me, we are always anxious. You’ll come in and see me chyld, Mr. May, and let her mother thank her deliverer. We talk of nothing else, if ye’ll believe me. Ye are a sort of a little god, me young hero, to the little one, and her grateful parents, and ye’ll not pass me humble door.’

‘I can’t come in to-day,’ said John, blushing a little, yet not without a sense that all this applause was pleasant, ‘for I’m waiting for my sister who has gone into one of these shops. I am glad I did not go after her, or I should not have seen you; but I will come another time to see you and the little girl.’

‘Do,’ said Montressor. He was a person who could not be called unobtrusive: his hat had a cock upon his head, and his elbow against his side, which called the attention of the passersby. His shaven face with its deep lines, and mobile features, and even his way of standing about, occupying much more than his proper share of the pavement, aroused the attention. John felt unpleasantly that the people who passed stared, and that one or two lingered a little, contemplating the old actor, with that frank curiosity which the British public permits itself to display. John, being young and shy, did not like these demonstrations; but they pleased the object of them, who stood aside a little, and said to his young companion, ‘They remember Montressor. Though the managers consider me passé, sir, me old admirers, those that have once flocked to see me in my favourite parts, have not forgotten me. The public makes up for the injustice of the officials; me kind friends—me good friends! This would be sweet to the heart of me faithful partner, Mr. May.’

‘Yes, perhaps she would like it,’ said John, hesitating. But for himself, he could not disguise that he shrank from the appreciation of the passengers in the Strand. Montressor was too much occupied by the pleasure it gave himself, however, to observe this.

‘The public, Mr. May,’ he said, ‘is the best of masters to the artist. As soon as ye can get face to face with it, sir, the battle’s done. It’s the officials, the managers, the middle-men, those that live upon the artist’s blood:—but a generous public never forgets an old servant.’ He looked round upon the people who stared and lingered, as if with the intention of addressing his thanks to them, while poor John shrank into himself.

‘I think I must bid you good-bye, sir,’ said the boy. ‘My sister is waiting for me. I’ll come and see you soon, and ask for—for the little girl.’

‘Must ye go?—then I’ll not detain ye. You’re right not to keep a lady waiting. Yes, come, me young hero—with us you’ll ever find a grateful welcome. And I’ll tell Nelly ye have promised. Good-bye, and a father’s blessing, Mr. May.’

To John’s surprise Susie came out to him from the shop, whence she had seen everything and heard something, looking very agitated and pale.

‘You don’t mean to say, John,’ she said, suddenly carrying him away in the opposite direction, ‘that that man knows you by the name of May?’

‘I never said anything about it,’ said John, in his surprise, ‘but it is true, whoever told you. That is the name he knows me by—and why not, since it is my name.’

‘Oh, John!’ cried Susie, with tears in her eyes; ‘when I told you it was for family reasons, for property and that sort of thing! Why will you be so perverse? Do you think it is a nice thing, do you think it looks honest and true, to have two names?’

‘Perhaps not,’ said the lad, ‘but then, let me have my own that was mine when I was a little child. Your family reasons, Susie, they were never told to me.’

‘Then for mere pride you will make an end of all mother has done and tried to do all her life, because she couldn’t explain to you, a little boy that couldn’t understand; you’ll expose her to all sorts of trouble, and yourself—yourself to——’

The tears were in Susie’s eyes. Her countenance, so gentle and mild, was suffused with angry colour, with indignation and impatience.

‘Even that man,’ she said, ‘even that man, a stranger, could—— Oh, John, will you go against grandfather as well as the rest of us? He left you the most of what he had, and his own good name, John Sandford, because he had no son. Will you go against grandfather and grandmother too?’

‘No,’ said John, after a pause, ‘I never did, and I never will. I suppose they wished it, though they never said anything. But, Susie, I’m no longer a child. All those circumstances you speak of, that you have known for years and years, surely may be told to me too?’

She shuddered a little and turned her face away.

‘I’ll speak to mother,’ she said, in a subdued voice. Then, more boldly, ‘But if you’re to be John Sandford, as grandfather said, you can’t be—the other. Is it right to have two names? It is just the one thing that cannot be done. It looks as if one were dishonest, untrue, to hide one’s name——’

‘I have no reason to do that,’ said John. ‘If you are sure grandfather intended it to be so? He never said anything to me. I always took it for granted without inquiring. I had forgotten the other. As for Mr. Montressor,’ said John, ‘I did it without thought. I had been thinking over it a great deal on the way to London, and when I saw him it was the first thing that came into my head.’

‘And how do you know Montressor?’ Susie asked.

‘Why, Susie, that is the man of last night!’

‘The man of last night! the man whose child—— And you gave him that other name? Oh!’ She gave a little fluttering cry, then paused, with a look of consternation growing upon her face. She stopped short for a moment in the streets in the extremity of her perplexed and troubled sensations. Then she caught John’s arm again with a close pressure. ‘Don’t see that man any more. Oh, promise me not to see that man any more.’

‘Why?’ said John. ‘He is not perhaps so well-known as he thinks, but he is a good fellow enough, and knows a lot. He is very kind. You should see him with his little girl; and then he was so kind to me.’

‘Oh, John, oh, John!’ Susie cried. It had all been so pleasant when they had set out, when nothing but the ordinary incidents of living had to be taken into account. But now they had struck upon more difficult ground.

CHAPTER VI.

BEGINNING LIFE.

It was the career he had himself chosen, the very same career about which there had been so many consultations at home in the old times. This was how he described to himself a period so very little withdrawn from the present moment. At home—he had no home now, nor even a shadow of one. It was the profession he had chosen; Elly’s trade; the one they had fixed upon in their youthful fervour as the best for the advantage of the race, as well as for the worthy work and fit advancement of the young workman, who, in his way, was still to be a Christian knight. To make lighthouses and harbours for the safety of travellers at sea, and roads and bridges for the advantage of those at home—that was how the boy and girl had regarded it, or rather the girl and boy; for John had taken the matter from the beginning more soberly than Elly, taking satisfaction in the idea of learning surveying and all the other necessary preliminaries, even mathematics, at which he had always been so much the best. But when he was called to another interview in his mother’s room at the hospital, and with her pen in her hand, suspended in the midst of the reports she was writing, or the accounts she was making up, Mrs. Sandford had given him the letter which he was to take to a certain address, and so begin work at once, John’s heart rose within him in resistance and indignation.

‘I have settled everything,’ his mother said. ‘You will have nothing to do but to send up your name and this note. Well, it is what I understood you had set your heart upon; isn’t it so? You want to be an engineer. So my father said.’

‘Yes, I want to be an engineer,’ John replied.

‘And they were sending you to a foundry in Liverpool—which is quite a different thing—when I interfered. You were not grateful to me, though your grandmother also, I believe, had been very, very much against it. You wanted to go there because I did not want you to go. Wasn’t that the reason? You must put away those childish ideas, John. Understand, once for all, that it is your real good I am seeking, and that it can be of no advantage in any way to retain this position of antagonism to me.’

‘I wish no antagonism,’ said the boy. ‘I think everything is settled very quickly, very—summarily. I think I might know a little. I am nearly eighteen. I might be allowed something to say.’

‘Be silent, Susie,’ said Mrs. Sandford, ‘there is no reason why you should interfere. You have been allowed a great deal to say. I have followed your own lead altogether. I might have put you into a merchant’s office, which would have been more in my way—but I have adopted yours without a word. You could scarcely point out to me the right people to apply to, I suppose? It is only so far as this goes that I have acted for myself. But I don’t see that this conversation can do us any good, John. Mr. Barrett is a great supporter of the hospital, he is a very good man, and he is one of the first in his profession. He will take you, rather for my sake, it is true, than your own, but that can’t be helped at your age; and, as he takes you without any premium, that is so much to your advantage. He will settle how you are to begin and all about it when you go to him, which I hope will be at once—to-day.’

John went away with his letter without saying any more, and he carried out his mother’s orders, but without any pleasure in the beginning, though as a matter of fact it was his own choice. That she meant his good, that she was doing the best she could for him, he believed, though grudgingly; but why should she do it so hardly, without grace or kindness, without anything that could make it pleasant? How often may such a question be asked; how impossible to answer it. To mean everything that is best in the world, to take trouble to do it, to heap solid benefits on the head of a dependant, a child, or retainer; and yet to do it all so as to make the kindness an offence, almost an insult. What a curious perversion is this of everything that is best and tenderest! John’s mother was substantially right as well as substantially kind. She had chosen the best guidance for her son. She had in no way thwarted his inclinations. She had indeed followed their natural bent, taken trouble to find the means of satisfying them; and yet! John went away without a word. He obeyed her and his fate. But he thus attained his own wish as if it had been a hardship, and submitted as to a fiat pronounced in entire indifference to his wishes. What he would have liked to do as he crossed the bridge, and felt the playful gust of the April wind in his face, would have been to drop the letter into the river, and go away in one of those outward-bound ships, on one of those clanging railways which made a black network all about, to the end of the world. That would have pleased him indeed! To throw the letter into the dark, quick-flowing tide, to disappear and be no more heard of: and finally, years after, to re-appear prosperous and great, John May, and bring wealth and reputation with him. His mind dallied with this dream as he went along, and especially as he crossed the bridge, which suggested freedom and movement. There is no thought that is so apt to come to a very young mind. To go away mysteriously, suddenly, leaving no trace, and in the future—that future which is scarcely further off to seventeen than to-morrow to a child—to come back triumphant to the confusion of all prophets of evil. Sometimes the young dreamer will carry out his vision, bringing misery and self-reproach to those he leaves behind, but coming back in most cases far from triumphant, forced by destitution or misery, perhaps, or at best disenchanted and dreary, dazzling no one with the success which has ceased to be sweet. Perhaps John, who had a great deal of sense, divined this—at all events, he was held by those bonds of duty which had lain on him lightly in the past, yet had created a tradition and necessity of obedience, which nothing he had yet encountered was strong enough to abrogate. He felt the temptation, but it never occurred to him as one to which he could yield—and though his heart was in revolt and his pride all in arms, yet he trudged along soberly across the river to Great George Street, where he was bound, without any active resistance, feeling himself under the guidance and control of an unkindly fate.

He was received not unkindly, however, though with great gravity, by Mr. Barrett, the gentleman to whom his mother’s letter was addressed, and who questioned him as to his studies, how far he had gone in his mathematics, and whether he had made any acquaintance with the special work of the profession he desired to take up. Mr. Barrett was a very serious person, indeed, in a dress that was almost clerical, and with manners more solemn than ever clergyman had, which is a curious effect not unusual among lay persons who assume the attitude of advice and exhortation, which is supposed to be the special privilege of the clergy. Mr. Barrett’s necktie was not white, but the grey and black with which it was striped were faint, producing a sort of illusion in point of colour; and his manners were more distinctive even than his tie.

‘I know your mother,’ he said, ‘she is an excellent woman, a most worthy person. Her son ought to be satisfactory, and I hope you will prove so; but she has had many trials, much more than fall to the ordinary lot.’

John did not make any reply; at all events nothing was audible of what he said, though in reality he kept up a fierce fire of response. ‘If she has had many trials she ought to have kept them from strangers,’ was what he said hotly within himself.

‘I trust you begin work with the hope and intention of making up to her a little for all she has had to bear,’ Mr. Barrett resumed. ‘She has been for many years under my personal observation, and anyone more devoted to duty I never saw.’

‘Oh, yes,’ said John to himself, ‘that is like Emily! not because she likes to do it, but because it’s duty,’ which was at once a hostile and foolish remark.

‘But you must remember,’ said his adviser, ‘that London is a place full of temptation and danger. Everywhere it is easy to go wrong; so much easier unfortunately than to do right; but in London the devil is roaring at every street corner, seeking whom he may devour. You must make up your mind to struggle stoutly against his wiles. I can’t even shut out of my office, though I try to be as careful as possible, those who prefer the broad path to the narrow; but I hope you will not let yourself be led away.’

‘I hope I shall do my duty, sir,’ said John, this time audibly enough, in a not very sweet or genial voice.

‘I hope you will—that is the right way to look at it: especially to a young man in your position, a great deal of care is necessary. Among my other pupils you will find some who have less occasion, as people say, to work. I don’t myself allow that. I think every man ought to work, and work with all his strength, if not for necessity, yet for—duty, as you say. But the sons of parents, who are well-off in this world’s goods, often take a great deal of licence, which you, Sandford, in your position, must not take as an example. You must keep your nose at the grindstone. It is doubly important for you in your circumstances.’

It was all that John could do not to demand audibly, as he did in his own consciousness: ‘What are my circumstances, then, what is my special position?’ His position had been a very good one all his life till now, the best in the village, after the rector’s family, their comrade and associate. He never had any occasion to think of himself as received on sufferance, as inferior to anyone. It wounded his pride bitterly to be compelled to look upon himself in this way.

‘Your advancement will depend upon yourself,’ Mr. Barrett continued. ‘It is for you to prove what you can do. After you have gone through your course of instruction, if you show yourself diligent, careful, and, above all, trustworthy, you will receive our best recommendation. But all this must depend entirely upon yourself. We can’t, of course, take you upon our shoulders and guarantee your future. This I hope your mother fully understands. I am willing to stretch a point for a woman who has acquitted herself so well under trying circumstances. But she must understand, and you must understand, that we don’t make ourselves responsible for you; you must in the end stand or fall on your own merits. The firm cannot carry you on their shoulders about the world—— ’

‘I hope no one expected anything of the kind,’ cried John, aching and throbbing with wounded pride.

‘No, no, I hope not. I think it is always better to make these things quite plain at first. The premium I remit with pleasure to such a worthy woman as Mrs. Sandford, to show my sense of her admirable conduct under very trying——’

‘I beg your pardon,’ cried John. ‘I don’t wish, for my part, to come in on better terms than the others. I don’t want any charity. I have not my own money at this moment, but I shall have it when I come of age, and I assure you there will be no difficulty about paying the premium then.’

Mr. Barrett looked at him with astonished eyes. To have charity cast back in his teeth is agreeable to no man. He stammered as he replied, with mingled indignation and astonishment,

‘I—I don’t understand you. What—what do you mean? Are you coming to me to propose an arrangement on your own account? or to complete one made by your mother?’ He regained his composure as he went on. ‘If this is temper, my young friend, we had better break off at once. I don’t want any touchy people taking offence about my place.’

His tone had changed. He had given up exhortation and good advice, and spoke sharply, with a ring of reality in his voice which brought John to himself.

‘I beg your pardon, sir. I am, perhaps, wrong. I don’t think I am ill-tempered or touchy. I do want to do my duty, and learn my work, and make my way. It was only the idea of charity: and I had never been used to it!’ John said.

‘I am afraid you’ll have a great deal to struggle with in your disposition, if that’s how you take things,’ said Mr. Barrett, shaking his head. He added, quickly, ‘I don’t know that I’ve time to go into the question of your feelings. The manager will tell you about hours and all arrangements. I hope he will have a good account to give of your work and progress. Good-day.’

This was all he made by his outburst of impatience and indignation. He left a disagreeable impression on the mind of his new employer, and went out himself sore, humiliated, and injured, feeling himself in the wrong. It was not his fault, he said to himself. It was the different position in which he found himself, so different from the past. That he should be of no account, received, if not out of charity, at least out of a humiliating kindness, because of his mother’s admirable conduct in her trying circumstances—in what trying circumstances? John could not believe that his father’s death had been so tremendous a grief as all these sayings seemed to imply. And then to be no longer consulted, no longer even told what was going to happen to him, sent off with a note like an errand-boy getting a place!

The pride or the humiliation of the boy who has always felt himself to be somebody, and suddenly discovers himself to be nobody, is not of much consequence to the world. It is not of much importance even to himself. In most cases it does him a great deal of good, and he lives to feel this, and smile at the keen pangs of his boyhood. And yet there are few pangs more keen. They cut like knives through the sensitive fibres of poor John’s heart, and the only refuge which his pride could take was in imagining circumstances in which he should vindicate himself—tremendous accidents, in which his courage and presence of mind should avert catastrophe, misfortunes in which he should be the deliverer—the most common of imaginations, the most usual of all the dreams of self-compensation. It was with his head full of all these new complications that he returned—not home, which was the word that came to his lips in spite of himself. Not home, he had now no home. Nobody could call Mrs. Sandford’s rooms at the hospital, home, not even Susie.

John’s heart swelled as he caught himself on the eve of using that antiquated word, that word which had no significance any more: and then he thought of Elly under the old pear-tree with her algebra, thinking of him. She had told him to think of her so. A little picture rose before him quite suddenly. Elly under the pear-tree with her algebra! A smile flickered to his lips at the thought. She would be sure to think of him, for she was not very fond of algebra, and, to escape a little from those mystic signs and symbols, Elly would be glad to take refuge in recollections of her friend who was almost like a brother. He thought he could see her under the old pear-tree, with the wind in her hair, lifting the long, heavy, beautiful locks. The pear-blossoms would not be over yet, the sun would make it shine like an old castle with turrets of white. Mr. Cattley would still look over Elly’s algebra and shake his head. Oh, yes, he would shake his head more than ever; for John would not be there to suggest a way out of those thorny paths, and Elly would not make much of them without that help. It gave him a sensation of pleasure, as if he had escaped for a moment from all the gravities of fate, into that cheerful garden, and found a glimpse of something like home in Elly’s bright face.

‘You must find fresh lodgings, nearer to your work,’ said Mrs. Sandford, when she received his report, which was given, it is unnecessary to say, with considerable reticence, and disclosed nothing about the little encounter with Mr. Barrett on the subject of the premium, any more than it did of that imaginary glimpse of Elly in the rectory garden. ‘I am very glad it is all settled so comfortably; but you must find lodgings nearer your work.’

‘I shall not mind the walk. After the day’s work I should like it.’

‘No. I should not like it for you. I don’t want you to get the habit of roaming about London. It is not good either for soul or body. A lodging near the office is best.’

‘You surely don’t mean to shut me up in the evenings,’ said the boy. ‘You don’t mean me to stay indoors all the night?’

‘It would be much better for you if you did—for yourself. You could find plenty to occupy you. You might carry on your studies, or, if you wanted amusement, you might read. Twenty years hence you will be pleased to think that was how you spent your nights.’

‘I can see no reason,’ he said, ‘why I could not do all that, and yet live where I am.’

‘That is because you love the streets,’ said his mother. ‘I know: oh, I did not require that you should tell me. You like the movement and the noise and the amusement.’

‘It is quite true,’ said John, ‘and is there any harm?’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘did not I tell you, Susie—he is his father’s son.’

CHAPTER VII.

A MAN GROWN.

After this there ensues a gap in John’s life:—no real gap, indeed, but a steady, quiet continuance of work and training of which the record might be interesting enough to those who are pursuing the same path, but not perhaps to anyone else. He was transferred to lodgings nearer his work, almost without any will of his own, his mother acting for him with a steady authority against which he chafed, but which it was impossible to resist. The lodgings might have been the same as those from which he was transferred, a little parlour, a little bed-room, a red and blue cover on the table, a horse-hair sofa, the same features were in both. And here John settled down. He knew nobody to lead him into the ordinary haunts of young men in London; and perhaps the fixed prepossession against him that he was sure to like what was wrong, had as strong an influence as the fixed certainty that nothing but right and honest things could come from him, which does so much for some favourites of nature. Human nature is very contradictory, and no two specimens can be guided in the same way. His mother’s stern observation of every possible indication of weakness, and Susie’s wistful watch, enlisted perhaps the evil as well as the good of John’s nature in the cause of virtue. His temper, and that perversity which is more or less in every natural character, rose in arms against the imputation that was upon him. He said to himself that, whatever happened, their prognostics should not be permitted to be right: and thus aided, so to speak, by his demons as well as by his angels, with his head held high against all the solicitations of the lower nature which would have proved that injurious foregone conclusion to be a just one, he made his way through the loneliness of those early years—going back evening after evening to spend the dull hours in his little sitting-room, with a determination which virtue alone might not have been equal to, without the aid of those forces of pride, and opposition, and resistance to injustice.

This austere self-restraint told upon his work, as it always does. Temperance and purity give wings to the mind, as they give force to the body. He read in self-defence, to quench all youthful longings after gaiety and brightness, and when he had exhausted poetry and fiction, which naturally he felt to be the best indemnifications and solaces for his loneliness, he began to read for work and for ambition, and soon found in those books that dealt either directly or indirectly with his profession, an interest more ardent, more exciting, than even that of story. From seventeen to twenty-one, a youth, with this inclination for work and few distractions, can get through an enormous amount of reading: and John’s mind gradually filled with stores such as no student need have been ashamed of. They were not perhaps so classical as they might have been had he gone to the University, but, in all probability, even in that respect they were fully as extensive as they would have been had John without the stimulus of his resolution and his solitude ‘gone up’ with Dick and Percy Spencer into the midst of the noisy young life of their college. He would not have resisted these cheerful influences; he would have done what the others did, and read as little as was necessary. But in the unlovely quiet of his little parlour in a little London street, with pride and angry self-defence keeping his door, along with more celestial guardians, he read with enthusiasm, with passion: and as his books, after the first juvenile frenzy for the lovelier and lighter portions of literature, were practical and serious, engaged with the present rather than the past, he became by degrees a mine of information, thoroughly equipped for all the chances of his work, and every region that these might lead him to. He read travels and books upon new and little known countries with devotion. He studied every scheme for the new development of the untrodden portions of the earth. He had the stories of all great industrial undertakings at his fingers’ end. In short, John got to know so very much more than the narrator of his story, that I give up the attempt to follow him, simply adding that though it had been done rather with the intention of making that austere life possible, than from any other reason, it had the most admirable effects both on his mind and his work. Such stores are like the miraculous gifts of the Gospel, they cannot be hid. It soon became apparent, both to those who were over him and to his fellow-pupils, that for the settling of a disputed question, or for the geography of any new piece of work undertaken by the firm, or for those most essential questions about native workmen and local government which tell so much on enterprises like theirs, there was no such referee as John. He was sent for before Messrs. Barrett would settle about that railway in Hungary. He was consulted as to the South American business, which eventually, young Sandford’s knowledge having been overborne by the apparent advantage of the undertaking, was a source of so much trouble to the firm. And, by the time he was twenty-one, John was recognised by everybody as the most valuable of all the young men trained in the office. He had already been sent ‘abroad,’ a word which means anything from Calais to Africa, several times. He had been in America. He was altogether an accomplished and fully-trained engineer, capable to tackle even the lighthouses of Elly’s fancy, but perhaps not so earnest about lighthouses as, under Elly’s inspiration, he had been in his seventeenth year.

All this time his correspondence with Elly had never dropped: but it had become intermittent. They had not met during these years which tell for so much in a young man’s life, and probably even tell for more in the experience of a girl. How she had grown up, or whether she had grown up at all, was a question which John did not discuss with himself. He was very fond of Elly, no one had ever taken her place in his mind. He still thought of her under the pear-tree with her algebra, as if during all this time there had been no further development either of herself or her studies. Elly probably formed a clearer apprehension of the changes that had occurred in him: but to John she was still in short frocks, with all that beautiful hair about her shoulders. He thought sometimes of the serious kiss which had passed between them in token of everlasting friendship, of brotherhood and sisterhood, a seal of youthful affection untinged by any of the agitations or uneasy appropriations of love. It had brought a little colour to Elly’s cheek, but none to that of John, who had asked for it so seriously. The thought brought a little stir now, a little pleasurable movement of his blood. A sister, but not like Susie; a friend, but holding a place apart which no other friend could come near. And, to tell the truth, John had not very many friends; his early life had been against it, and those guardian demons of whom we have spoken—demons without discrimination, who kept out good as well as evil. He was friendly with most of the people about him, but he had not many intimates. The place in which Elly lived supreme, and that in which even Dick and Percy were still recognised as ‘the other boys,’ was kept sacred to that early circle which had been the closest and the warmest John had ever known—all the more so from its contrast with what followed, from the severe mother amid all the cares and business of the hospital, and Susie with her wistful, watchful eyes.

He had not paid very much attention to the fact that his birthday was his twenty-first, and that he was attaining his majority, though that is so important a point in the career of many young men. It was not particularly important to John. He had no joyful tenantry to celebrate it; no happy father and mother to wish him joy. He was already in some things much older than his age, experienced by long encounter with the practical, and by the habits of self-dependence which the nature of his occupations had forced upon him. He was rather, if anything, disposed to smile at the importance of twenty-one, not seeing what difference it could make. His little property he had long ceased to think of. At seventeen it had seemed important; at twenty, nothing. What could it matter? It was better, even more just, he thought, that his mother should have it, who was after all the natural heir of her parents: and if it could purchase a little ease, a little relaxation for her, John was not only generously willing, but had a less amiable, half scornful feeling, that to throw it back at her feet was the only thing that he could desire to do. He was astonished accordingly when he went by her invitation on the evening of his birthday to visit his mother, to find her table covered with papers and she herself awaiting his arrival with a number of accounts and note-books.

‘I have to render an account of my stewardship,’ she said, with her usual gravity. He did not always recognise the change in her manner of speaking to him and regarding him, but nevertheless there was a great change.

‘What stewardship?’ he said.

‘I cease to-day to be your guardian, John, and your trustee and manager and everything. My father thought it unnecessary to burden you with any of those things. He had perhaps an excessive confidence in me. I have now to give up my accounts——’

‘I want no accounts,’ he said: ‘I want to hear nothing about it. If I am to be acknowledged a man, that’s enough. I’ve been to my own consciousness a man—and older than most people—long enough.’

‘Yes,’ she said, with a little sigh, ‘you are a man; you have proved yourself one. The softest of mothers (and I know I have never been soft) could not acknowledge that with more gratitude and satisfaction than I.’

‘But a little grudge,’ he said, with a laugh. He was able to laugh now, though never to forget altogether the bitterness of being misjudged. He no longer talked to her with constraint, feeling himself like a child in her presence—but even yet he was never really at his ease with her. ‘With a grudge,’ he said. ‘You would almost rather I had confirmed your bad opinion, and justified you in what you expected.’