The Colonel made great friends with the Woods, and he was deeply admired by our rector, who, like many parsons, had a very military heart, and delighted in exciting tales of the wide world which he could never explore. It was perhaps natural that my father should hardly be devoted to a stranger who had practically reproached his negligence, but the one thing that did draw him towards the old Indian officer was his habit of early rising. My father was always up before any of us, but he generally found the Colonel out before him, enjoying the early hours of the day as men who have lived in hot climates are accustomed to do. They used to come in together in very pleasant moods to breakfast; but with the post-bag Lorraine’s uncle was sure to be moved to voluble indignation, or pity, or to Utopian plans to which my father listened with puzzled impatience. He did not understand the Colonel, which was perhaps not to be wondered at.
His moral courage had taken away our breath, and physical courage was stamped upon his outward man. If he was anything he was manly. It was because he was in some respects very womanly too, that he puzzled my father’s purely masculine brain. The mixture, and the vehemence of the mixture, were not in his line. He would have turned “Crayshaw’s” matters over in his own mind as often as hay in a wet season before grappling with the whole bad business as the Colonel had done. And on the other hand, it made him feel uncomfortable and almost ashamed to see tears standing in the old soldier’s eyes as he passionately blamed himself for what had been suffered by “my sister’s son.”
The servants one and all adored Colonel Jervois. They are rather acute judges of good breeding, and men and maids were at one on the fact that he was a visitor who conferred social distinction on the establishment. They had decided that we should “dine late so long as The Gentleman” was with us, whilst my mother was thinking how to break so weighty an innovation to such valuable servants. They served him with alacrity, and approved of his brief orders and gracious thanks. The Colonel did unheard-of things with impunity—threw open his bed-room shutters at night, and more than once unbarred and unbolted the front door to go outside for a late cigar. Nothing puzzled Martha more than the nattiness with which he put all the bolts and bars back into their places, as if he had been used to the door as long as she had.
Indeed he had all that power of making himself at home, which is most fully acquired by having had to provide for yourself in strange places, but he carried it too far.
One day he penetrated into the kitchen (having previously been rummaging the kitchen-garden) and insisted upon teaching our cook how to make curry. The lesson was much needed, and it was equally well intended, but it was a mistake. Everything cannot be carried by storm, whatever the military may think. Jane said, “Yes, sir,” at every point that approached to a pause in the Colonel’s ample instructions, but she never moved her eyes from the magnificent moustache which drooped above the stew-pan, nor her thoughts from the one idea produced by the occasion—that The Gentleman had caught her without her cap. In short our curries were no worse, and no better, in consequence of the shock to kitchen etiquette (for that was all) which she received.
And yet we modified our household ways for him, as they were never modified for any one else. On Martha’s weekly festival for cleaning the bedrooms (and if a room was occupied for a night, she scrubbed after the intruder as if he had brought the plague in his portmanteau) the smartest visitor we ever entertained had to pick his or her way through the upper regions of the house, where soap and soda were wafted on high and unexpected breezes along passages filled with washstands and clothes-baskets, cane-seated chairs and baths, mops, pails and brooms. But the Colonel had “given such a jump” on meeting a towel-horse at large round a sharp corner, and had seemed so uncomfortable on finding everything that he thought was inside his room turned outside, that for that week Martha left the lower part of the house uncleaned, and did not turn either the dining or drawing rooms into the hall on their appointed days. She had her revenge when he was gone.
On the day of his departure, my lamentations had met with the warmest sympathy as I stirred toffy over Jane’s kitchen fire, whilst Martha lingered with the breakfast things, after a fashion very unusual with her, and gazed at the toast-rack and said, “the Colonel had eaten nothing of a breakfast to travel on.” But next morning, I met her in another mood. It was a mood to which we were not strangers, though it did not often occur. In brief, Martha (like many another invaluable domestic) “had a temper of her own”; but to do her justice her ill feelings generally expended themselves in a rage for work, and in taking as little ease herself as she allowed to other people. I knew what it meant when I found her cleaning the best silver when she ought to have been eating her breakfast; but my head was so full of the Colonel, that I could not help talking about him, even if the temptation to tease Martha had not been overwhelming. No reply could I extract; only once, as she passed swiftly to the china cupboard, with the whole Crown Derby tea and coffee service on one big tray (the Colonel had praised her coffee), I heard her mutter—“Soldiers is very upsetting.” Certainly, considering what she did in the way of scolding, scouring, blackleading, polishing and sand-papering that week, it was not Martha’s fault if we did not “get straight again,” furniture and feelings. I’ve heard her say that Calais sand would “fetch anything off,” and I think it had fetched the Colonel off her heart by the time that the cleaning was done.
It had no such effect on mine. Lewis Lorraine himself did not worship his uncle more devoutly than I. Colonel Jervois had given me a new ideal. It was possible, then, to be enthusiastic without being unmanly; to live years out of England, and come back more patriotic than many people who stayed comfortably at home; to go forth into the world and be the simpler as well as the wiser, the softer as well as the stronger for the experience? So it seemed. And yet Lewis had told me, with such tears as Snuffy never made him shed, how tender his uncle was to his unworthiness, what allowances he made for the worst that Lewis could say of himself, and what hope he gave him of a good and happy future.
“He cried as bad as I did,” Lewis said, “and begged me to forgive him for having trusted so much to my other guardian. Do you know, Jack, Snuffy regularly forged a letter like my handwriting, to answer that one Uncle Eustace wrote, which he kept back? He might well do such good copies, and write the year of Our Lord with a swan at the end of the last flourish! And you remember what we heard about his having been in prison—but, oh, dear! I don’t want to remember. He says I am to forget, and he forbade me to talk about Crayshaw’s, and said I was not to trouble my head about anything that had happened there. He kept saying, ‘Forget, my boy, forget! Say God help me, and look forward. While there’s life there’s always the chance of a better life for every one. Forget! forget!’”
Lewis departed with his uncle. Charlie went for two nights to the moors. Jem’s holidays had not begun, and in our house we were “cleaning down” after the Colonel as if he had been the sweeps.
I went to old Isaac for sympathy. He had become very rheumatic the last two years, but he was as intelligent as ever, and into his willing ear I poured all that I could tell of my hero, and much that I only imagined.
His sympathy met me more than half-way. The villagers as a body were unbounded in their approval of the Colonel, and Mrs. Irvine was even greedier than old Isaac for every particular I could impart respecting him.
“He’s a handsome gentleman,” said the bee-master’s wife, “and he passed us (my neighbour, Mrs. Mettam, and me) as near, sir, as I am to you, with a gold-headed stick in his hand, and them lads following after him, for all the world like the Good Shepherd and his flock.”
I managed not to laugh, and old Isaac added, “There’s a many in this village, sir, would have been glad to have taken the liberty of expressing themselves to the Colonel, and a depitation did get as far as your father’s gates one night, but they turned bashful and come home again. And I know, for one, Master Jack, that if me and my missus had had a room fit to offer one of them poor young gentlemen, I’d have given a week’s wage to do it, and the old woman would have been happy to her dying day.”
CHAPTER XII.
“God help me! save I take my part
Of danger on the roaring sea,
A devil rises in my heart,
Far worse than any death to me.”
Tennyson’s Sailor-boy.
The fact that my father had sent me back against my will to a school where I had suffered so much and learnt so little, ought perhaps to have drawn us together when he discovered his mistake. Unfortunately it did not. He was deeply annoyed with himself for having been taken in by Snuffy, but he transferred some of this annoyance to me, on grounds which cut me to the soul, and which I fear I resented so much that I was not in a mood that was favourable to producing a better understanding between us. The injustice which I felt so keenly was, that my father reproached me with having what he called “kept him in the dark” about the life at Crayshaw’s. At my age I must have seen how wicked the man and his system were.
I reminded him that I had run away from them once, and had told all that I dared, but that he would not hear me then. He would not hear me now.
“I don’t wish to discuss the subject. It is a very painful one,” he said (and I believe it was as physically distressing to him as the thought of Cripple Charlie’s malformation). “I have no wish to force your confidence when it is too late,” he added (and it was this which I felt to be so hard). “I don’t blame you; you have other friends who suit you better, but you have never been fully open with me. All I can say is, if Mr. Wood was better informed than I have been, and did not acquaint me, he has behaved in a manner which—— There—don’t speak! we’ll dismiss the subject. You have suffered enough, if you have not acted as I should have expected you to act. I blame myself unutterably, and I hope I see my way to such a comfortable and respectable start in life for you that these three years in that vile place may not be to your permanent disadvantage.”
I was just opening my lips to thank him, when he got up and went to his tall desk, where he took a pinch of snuff, and then added as he turned away, “Thank God I have one son who is frank with his father!”
My lips were sealed in an instant. This, then, was my reward for that hard journey of escape, with Jem on my back, which had only saved him; for having stifled envy in gladness for his sake, when (in those bits of our different holidays which overlapped each other) I saw and felt the contrast between our opportunities; for having suffered my harder lot in silence that my mother might not fret, when I felt certain that my father would not interfere! My heart beat as if it would have pumped the tears into my eyes by main force, but I kept them back, and said steadily enough, “Is that all, sir?”
My father did not look up, but he nodded his head and said, “Yes; you may go.”
As I went he called me back.
“Are you going to the farm this afternoon?”
To my own infinite annoyance I blushed as I answered, “I was going to sit with Charlie a bit, unless you have any objection.”
“Not at all. I only asked for information. I have no wish to interfere with any respectable friends you may be disposed to give your confidence to. But I should like it to be understood that either your mother or I must have some knowledge of your movements.”
“Mother knew quite well I was going!” I exclaimed “Why, I’ve got a parcel to take to Mrs. Wood from her.”
“Very good. There’s no occasion to display temper. Shut the door after you.”
I shut it very gently. (If three years at Crayshaw’s had taught me nothing else, it had taught me much self-control.) Then I got away to the first hiding-place I could find, and buried my head upon my arms. Would not a beating from Snuffy have been less hard to bear? Surely sore bones from those one despises are not so painful as a sore heart from those one loves.
Our household affections were too sound at the core for the mere fact of displeasing my father not to weigh heavily on my soul. But I could not help defending myself in my own mind against what I knew to be injustice.
Jem “frank with his father”? Well he might be, when our father’s partiality met him half-way at every turn. That was no fancy of mine. I had the clearest of childish remembrances of an occasion when I wanted to do something which our farming-man thought my father would not approve, and how when I urged the fact that Jem had already done it with impunity, he shook his head wiseacrely, and said, “Aye, aye, Master Jack. But ye know they say some folks may steal a horse, when other folks mayn’t look over the hedge.”
The vagueness of “some folks” and “other folks” had left the proverb dark to my understanding when I heard it, but I remembered it till I understood it.
I never was really jealous of Jem. He was far too good-natured and unspoilt, and I was too fond of him. Besides which, if the mental tone of our country lives was at rather a dull level, it was also wholesomely unfavourable to the cultivation of morbid grievances, or the dissection of one’s own hurt feelings. If I had told anybody about me, from my dear mother down to our farming-man, that I was misunderstood and wanted sympathy, I should probably have been answered that many a lad of my age was homeless and wanted boots. As a matter of reasoning the reply would have been defective, but for practical purposes it would have been much to the point. And it is fair to this rough-and-ready sort of philosophy to defend it from a common charge of selfishness. It was not that I should have been the happier because another lad was miserable, but that an awakened sympathy with his harder fate would tend to dwarf egotistic absorption in my own. Such considerations, in short, are no justification of those who are responsible for needless evil or neglected good, but they are handy helps to those who suffer from them, and who feel sadly sorry for themselves.
I am sure the early-begun and oft-reiterated teaching of daily thankfulness for daily blessing was very useful to me at Crayshaw’s and has been useful to me ever since. With my dear mother herself it was merely part of that pure and constant piety which ran through her daily life, like a stream that is never frozen and never runs dry. In me it had no such grace, but it was an early-taught good habit (as instinctive as any bodily habit) to feel—“Well, I’m thankful things are not so with me;” as quickly as “Ah, it might have been thus!” Looking at the fates and fortunes and dispositions of other boys, I had, even at Snuffy’s “much to be thankful for” as well as much to endure, and it was a good thing for me that I could balance the two. For if the grace of thankfulness does not solve the riddles of life, it lends a willing shoulder to its common burdens.
I certainly had needed all my philosophy at home as well as at school. It was hard to come back, one holiday-time after another, ignorant except for books that I devoured in the holidays, and for my own independent studies of maps, and an old geography book at Snuffy’s from which I was allowed to give lessons to the lowest form; rough in looks, and dress, and manners (I knew it, but it requires some self-respect even to use a nail-brush, and self-respect was next door to impossible at Crayshaw’s); and with my north-country accent deepened, and my conversation disfigured by slang which, not being fashionable slang, was as inadmissible as thieves’ lingo; it was hard, I say, to come back thus, and meet dear old Jem, and generally one at least of his school-fellows whom he had asked to be allowed to invite—both of them well dressed, well cared for, and well mannered, full of games that were not in fashion at Crayshaw’s, and slang as “correct” as it was unintelligible.
Jem’s heart was as true to me as ever, but he was not so thin-skinned as I am. He was never a fellow who worried himself much about anything, and I don’t think it struck him I could feel hurt or lonely. He would say, “I say, Jack, what a beastly way your hair is cut. I wish Father would let you come to our school:” or, “Don’t say it was a dirty trick—say it was a beastly chouse, or something of that sort. We’re awfully particular about talking at ——’s, and I don’t want Cholmondley to hear you.”
Jem was wonderfully polished-up himself, and as pugnacious on behalf of all the institutions of his school as he had once been about our pond. I got my hair as near right as one cutting and the town hair-cutter could bring it, and mended my manners and held my own with good temper. When it came to feats of skill or endurance, I more than held my own. Indeed, I so amazed one very “swell” little friend of Jem’s whose mother (a titled lady) had allowed him to spend part of the summer holidays with Jem for change of air, that he vowed I must go and stay with him in the winter, and do juggler and acrobat at their Christmas theatricals. But he may have reported me as being rough as well as ready, for her ladyship never ratified the invitation. Not that I would have left home at Christmas, and not that I lacked pleasure in the holidays. But other fashions of games and speech and boyish etiquette lay between me and Jem; hospitality, if not choice, kept him closely with his school-fellows, and neither they nor he had part in the day-dreams of my soul.
For the spell of the Penny Numbers had not grown weaker as I grew older. In the holidays I came back to them as to friends. At school they made the faded maps on Snuffy’s dirty walls alive with visions, and many a night as I lay awake with pain and over-weariness in the stifling dormitory, my thoughts took refuge not in dreams of home nor in castles of the air, but in phantom ships that sailed for ever round the world.
The day of the interview with my father I roused myself from my grievances to consider a more practical question. Why should I not go to sea? No matter whose fault it was, there was no doubt that I was ill-educated, and that I did not please my father as Jem did. On the other hand I was strong and hardy, nimble and willing to obey; and I had roughed it enough, in all conscience. I must have ill luck indeed, if I lit upon a captain more cruel than Mr. Crayshaw. I did not know exactly how it was to be accomplished, but I knew enough to know that I could not aim at the Royal Navy. Of course I should have preferred it. I had never seen naval officers, but if they were like officers in the army, like Colonel Jervois, for instance, it was with such a port and bearing that I would fain have carried myself when I grew up to be a man. I guessed, however, that money and many other considerations might make it impossible for me to be a midshipman; but I had heard of boys being apprenticed to merchant-vessels, and I resolved to ask my father if he would so apprentice me.
He refused, and he accompanied his refusal with an unfavourable commentary on my character and conduct, which was not the less bitter because the accusations were chiefly general.
This sudden fancy for the sea—well, if it were not a sudden fancy, but a dream of my life, what a painful instance it afforded of my habitual want of frankness!—This long-concealed project which I had suddenly brought to the surface—I had talked about it to my mother years ago, had I, but it had distressed her, and even to my father, but he had snubbed me?—then I had been deliberately fostering aims and plans to which I had always known that my parents would be opposed. My father didn’t believe a word of it. It was the old story. I must be peculiar at any price. I must have something new to amuse me, and be unlike the rest of the family. It was always the same. For years I had found more satisfaction from the conversation of a man who had spent ten years of his life in the hulks than from that of my own father. Then this Indian Colonel had taken my fancy, and it had made him sick to see the womanish—he could call it no better, the weak-womanish—way in which I worshipped him. If I were a daughter instead of a son, my caprices would distress and astonish him less. He could have sent me to my mother, and my mother might have sent me to my needle. In a son, from whom he looked for manly feeling and good English common-sense, it was painful in the extreme. Vanity, the love of my own way, and want of candour—(my father took a pinch of snuff between each count of the indictment)—these were my besetting sins, and would lead me into serious trouble. This new fad, just, too, when he had made most favourable arrangements for my admission into my Uncle Henry’s office as the first step in a prosperous career. I didn’t know; didn’t I? Perhaps not. Perhaps I had been at the Woods’ when he and my mother were speaking of it. But now I did know. The matter was decided, and he hoped I should profit by my opportunities. I might go, and I was to shut the door after me.
I omit what my father said of the matter from a religious point of view, though he accused me of flying in the face of Providence as well as the Fifth Commandment. The piety which kept a pure and God-fearing atmosphere about my home, and to which I owe all the strength I have found against evil since I left it, was far too sincere in both my parents for me to speak of any phase of it with disrespect. Though I may say here that I think it is to be wished that more good people exercised judgment as well as faith in tracing the will of Heaven in their own. Practically I did not even then believe that I was more “called” to that station of life which was to be found in Uncle Henry’s office, than to that station of life which I should find on board a vessel in the Merchant Service, and it only discredited truth in my inmost soul when my father put his plans for my career in that light. Just as I could not help feeling it unfair that a commandment which might have been fairly appealed to if I had disobeyed him, should be used against me in argument because I disagreed with him.
I did disagree with him utterly. Uncle Henry’s office was a gloomy place, where I had had to endure long periods of waiting as a child when my mother took us in to the dentist, and had shopping and visiting of uncertain length to do. Uncle Henry himself was no favourite with me. He was harder than my father if you vexed him, and less genial when you didn’t. And I wanted to go to sea. But it did not seem a light matter to me to oppose my parents, and they were both against me. My dear mother was thrown into the profoundest distress by the bare notion. In her view to be at sea was merely to run an imminent and ceaseless risk of shipwreck; and even this jeopardy of life and limb was secondary to the dangers that going ashore in foreign places would bring upon my mind and morals.
So when my father spoke kindly to me at supper, and said that he had arranged with Mr. Wood that I should read with him for two hours every evening, in preparation for my future life as an articled clerk, my heart was softened. I thanked him gratefully, and resolved for my own part to follow what seemed to be the plain path of duty, though it led to Uncle Henry’s office, and not out into the world.
The capacity in which I began life in Uncle Henry’s office was that of office boy, and the situation was attended in my case with many favourable conditions. Uncle Henry wished me to sleep on the premises, as my predecessor had done, but an accidental circumstance led to my coming home daily, which I infinitely preferred. This was nothing less than an outbreak of boils all over me, upon which, every domestic application having failed, and gallons of herb tea only making me worse, Dr. Brown was called in, and pronounced my health in sore need of restoration. The regimen of Crayshaw’s was not to be recovered from in a day, and the old doctor would not hear of my living altogether in the town. If I went to the office at all, he said, I must ride in early, and ride out in the evening. So much fresh air and exercise were imperative, and I must eat two solid meals a day under no less careful an eye than that of my mother.
She was delighted. She thought (even more than usual) that Doctor Brown was a very Solomon in spectacles, and I quite agreed with her. The few words that followed gave a slight shock to her favourable opinion of his wisdom, but I need hardly say that it confirmed mine.
He had given me a kindly slap on the shoulder, which happened at that moment to be the sorest point in my body, and I was in no small pain from head to foot. I only tightened my lips, but I suppose he bethought himself of what he had done, and he looked keenly at me and said, “You can bear pain, Master Jack?”
“Oh, Jack’s a very brave boy,” said my dear mother. “Indeed, he’s only too brave. He upset his father and me terribly last week by wanting to go to sea instead of to the office.”
“And much better for him, ma’am,” said the old doctor, promptly; “he’ll make a first-rate sailor, and if Crayshaw’s is all the schooling he’s had, a very indifferent clerk.”
“That’s just what I think!” I began, but my mother coloured crimson with distress, and I stopped, and went after her worsted ball which she had dropped, whilst she appealed to Doctor Brown.
“Pray don’t say so, Doctor Brown. Jack is very good, and it’s all quite decided. I couldn’t part with him, and his father would be so annoyed if the subject——”
“Tut, tut, ma’am!” said the doctor, pocketing his spectacles; “I never interfere with family affairs, and I never repeat what I hear. The first rules of the profession, young gentleman, and very good general rules for anybody.”
I got quite well again, and my new life began. I rode in and out of the town every day on Rob Roy, our red-haired pony. After tea I went to the farm to be taught by Mr. Wood, and at every opportunity I devoured such books as I could lay my hands on. I fear I had very little excuse for not being contented now. And yet I was not content.
It seems absurd to say that the drains had anything to do with it, but the horrible smell which pervaded the office added to the distastefulness of the place, and made us all feel ill and fretful, except my uncle, and Moses Benson, the Jew clerk. He was never ill, and he said he smelt nothing; which shows that one may have a very big nose to very little purpose.
My uncle pooh-poohed the unwholesome state of the office, for two reasons which certainly had some weight. The first was that he himself had been there for five-and-twenty years without suffering by it; and the second was, that the defects of drainage were so radical that (the place belonging to that period of house-building when the system of drainage was often worse than none at all) half the premises, if not half the street, would have to be pulled down for any effectual remedy. So it was left as it was, and when Mr. Burton, the head clerk, had worse headaches than usual, he used to give me sixpence for chloride of lime, which I distributed at my discretion, and on those days Moses Benson used generally to say that he “fancied he smelt something.”
Moses Benson was an articled clerk to my uncle, but he had no pretensions to be considered a gentleman. His father kept a small shop where second-hand watches were the most obvious goods; but the old man was said to have money, though the watches did not seem to sell very fast, and his son had duly qualified for his post, and had paid a good premium. Moses was only two or three years older than I, not that I could have told anything about his age from his looks. He was sallow, and had a big nose; his hands were fat, his feet were small, and I think his head was large, but perhaps his hair made it look larger than it was, for it was thick and very black, and though it was curly, it was not like Jem’s; the curls were more like short ringlets, and if he bent over his desk they hid his forehead, and when he put his head back to think, they lay on his coat-collar. And I suppose it was partly because he could not smell with his nose, that he used such very strong hair-oil, and so much of it. It used to make his coat-collar in a horrid state, but he always kept a little bottle of “scouring drops” on the ledge of his desk, and when it got very bad, I knelt behind him on the corner of his stool and scoured his coat-collar with a little bit of flannel. Not that I did it half so well as he could. He wore very odd-looking clothes, but he took great care of them, and was always touching them up, and “reviving” his hat with one of Mrs. O’Flannagan’s irons. He used to sell bottles of the scouring drops to the other clerks, and once he got me to get my mother to buy some. He gave me a good many little odd jobs to do for him, but he always thanked me, and from the beginning to the end of our acquaintance he was invariably kind.
I remember a very odd scene that happened at the beginning of it.
Mr. Burton (the other clerk, whose time was to expire the following year, which was to make a vacancy for me) was a very different man from Moses Benson. He was respectably connected, and looked down on “the Jew-boy,” but he was hot-tempered, and rather slow-witted, and I think Moses could manage him; and I think it was he who kept their constant “tiffs” from coming to real quarrels.
One day, very soon after I began office-life, Benson sent me out to get him some fancy notepaper, and when I came back I saw the red-haired Mr. Burton standing by the desk and looking rather more sickly and cross than usual. I laid down the paper and the change, and asked if Benson wanted anything else. He thanked me exceedingly kindly, and said, “No,” and I went out of the enclosure and back to the corner where I had been cutting out some newspaper extracts for my uncle. At the same time I drew from under my overcoat which was lying there, an old railway volume of one of Cooper’s novels which Charlie had lent me. I ought not to have been reading novels in office-hours, but I had had to stop short last night because my candle went out just at the most exciting point, and I had had no time to see what became of everybody before I started for town in the morning. I could bear suspense no longer, and plunged into my book.
How it was in these circumstances that I heard what the two clerks were saying, I don’t know. They talked constantly in these open enclosures, when they knew I was within hearing. On this occasion I suppose they thought I had gone out, and it was some minutes before I discovered that they were talking of me. Burton spoke first, and in an irritated tone.
“You treat this young shaver precious different to the last one.”
The Jew spoke very softly, and with an occasional softening of the consonants in his words. “How obsherving you are!” said he.
Burton snorted. “It don’t take much observation to see that. But I suppose you have your reasons. You Jews are always so sly. That’s how you get on so, I suppose.”
“You Gentiles,” replied Moses (and the Jew’s voice had tones which gave him an infinite advantage in retaliating scorn), “you Gentiles would do as well as we do if you were able to foresee and knew how to wait. You have all the selfishness for success, my dear, but the gifts of prophecy and patience are wanting to you.”
“That’s nothing to do with your little game about the boy,” said Burton; “however, I suppose you can keep your own secrets.”
“I have no secrets,” said Moses gently. “And if you take my advice, you never will have. If you have no secrets, my dear, they will never be found out. If you tell your little designs, your best friends will be satisfied, and will not invent less creditable ones for you.”
“If they did, you’d talk ’em down,” said Burton roughly. “Short of a woman I never met such a hand at jaw. You’ll be in Parliament yet——” (“It is possible!” said the Jew hastily,) “with that long tongue of yours. But you haven’t told us about the boy, for all you’ve said.”
“About this boy,” said Moses, “a proverb will be shorter than my jaw. ‘The son of the house is not a servant for ever.’ As to the other—he was taken for charity and dismissed for theft, is it not so? He came from the dirt, and he went back to the dirt. They often do. Why should I be civil to him?”
What reply Mr. Burton would have made to this question I had no opportunity of judging. My uncle called him, and he ran hastily up-stairs. And when he had gone, the Jew came slowly out, and crossed the office as if he were going into the street. By this time my conscience was pricking hard, and I shoved my book under my coat and called to him: “Mr. Benson.”
“You?” he said.
“I am very sorry,” I stammered, blushing, “but I heard what you were saying. I did not mean to listen. I thought you knew that I was there.”
“It is of no importance,” he said, turning away; “I have no secrets.”
But I detained him.
“Mr. Benson! Tell me, please. You were talking about me, weren’t you? What did you mean about the son of the house not being a servant for ever?”
He hesitated for an instant, and then turned round and came nearer to me.
“It is true, is it not?” he said. “Next year you may be clerk. In time you may be your uncle’s confidential clerk, which I should like to be myself. You may eventually be partner, as I should like to be; and in the long run you may succeed him, as I should like to do. It is a good business, my dear, a sound business, a business of which much, very much, more might be made. You might die rich, very rich. You might be mayor, you might be Member, you might—but what is the use? You will not. You do not see it, though I am telling you. You will not wait for it, though it would come. What is that book you hid when I came in?”
“It is about North American Indians,” said I, dragging it forth. “I am very sorry, but I left off last night at such an exciting bit.”
The Jew was thumbing the pages, with his black ringlets close above them.
“Novels in office-hours!” said he; but he was very good-natured about it, and added, “I’ve one or two books at home, if you’re fond of this kind of reading, and will promise me not to forget your duties.”
“Oh, I promise!” said I.
“I’ll put them under my desk in the corner,” he said; “indeed, I would part with some of them for a trifle.”
I thanked him warmly, but what he had said was still hanging in my mind, and I added, “Are there real prophets among the Jews now-a-days, Mr. Benson?”
“They will make nothing by it, if there are,” said he; and there was a tone of mysteriousness in his manner of speaking which roused my romantic curiosity. “A few of ush (very few, my dear!) mould our own fates, and the lives of the rest are moulded by what men have within them rather than by what they find without. If there were a true prophet in every market-place to tell each man of his future, it would not alter the destinies of seven men in thish wide world.”
As Moses spoke the swing door was pushed open, and one of my uncle’s clients entered. He was an influential man, and a very tall one. The Jew bent his ringlets before him, almost beneath his elbow, and slipped out as he came in.
CHAPTER XIII.
“Then, hey for boot and horse, lad,
And round the world away!
Young blood must have its course, lad,
And every dog his day.”—C. Kingsley.
Moses Benson was as good as his word in the matter of books of adventure. Dirty books, some without backs, and some with very greasy ones (for which, if I bought them, I seldom paid more than half-price), but full of dangers and discoveries, the mightiness of manhood, and the wonders of the world. I read them at odd moments of my working hours, and dreamed of them when I went home to bed. And it was more fascinating still to look out, with Charlie’s help, in the Penny Numbers, for the foreign places, and people, and creatures mentioned in the tales, and to find that the truth was often stranger than the fiction.
To live a fancy-life of adventure in my own head, was not merely an amusement to me at this time—it was a refuge. Matters did not really improve between me and my father, though I had obeyed his wishes. It was by his arrangement that I spent so much of my time at home with the Woods, and yet it remained a grievance that I liked to do so. Whether my dear mother had given up all hopes of my becoming a genius I do not know, but my father’s contempt for my absorption in a book was unabated. I felt this if he came suddenly upon me with my head in my hands and my nose in a tattered volume; and if I went on with my reading it was with a sense of being in the wrong, whilst if I shut up the book and tried to throw myself into outside interests, my father’s manner showed me that my efforts had only discredited my candour.
As is commonly the case, it was chiefly little things that pulled the wrong way of the stuff of life between us, but they pulled it very much askew. I was selfishly absorbed in my own dreams, and I think my dear father made a mistake which is a too common bit of tyranny between people who love each other and live together. He was not satisfied with my doing what he liked, he expected me to be what he liked, that is, to be another person instead of myself. Wives and daughters seem now and then to respond to this expectation as to the call of duty, and to become inconsistent echoes, odd mixtures of severity and hesitancy, hypocrites on the highest grounds; but sons are not often so self-effacing, and it was not the case with me. It was so much the case with my dear mother, that she never was of the slightest use (which she might have been) when my father and I misunderstood each other. By my father’s views of the moment she always hastily set her own, whether they were fair or unfair to me; and she made up for it by indulging me at every point that did not cross an expressed wish of my father’s, or that could not annoy him because he was not there. She never held the scales between us.
And yet it was the thought of her which kept me from taking my fate into my own hands again and again. To have obeyed my father seemed to have done so little towards making him satisfied with me, that I found no consolation at home for the distastefulness of the office; and more than once I resolved to run away, and either enlist or go to Liverpool (which was at no great distance from us) and get on board some vessel that was about to sail for other lands. But when I thought of my mother’s distress, I could not face it, and I let my half-formed projects slide again.
Oddly enough, it was Uncle Henry who brought matters to a crisis. I think my father was disappointed (though he did not blame me) that I secured no warmer a place in Uncle Henry’s affections than I did. Uncle Henry had no children, and if he took a fancy to me and I pleased him, such a career as the Jew-clerk had sketched for me would probably be mine. This dawned on me by degrees through chance remarks from my father and the more open comments of friends. For good manners with us were not of a sensitively refined order, and to be clapped on the back with—“Well, Jack, you’ve got into a good berth, I hear. I suppose you look to succeed your uncle some day?” was reckoned a friendly familiarity rather than an offensive impertinence.
I learned that my parents had hoped that, as I was his nephew, Uncle Henry would take me as clerk without the usual premium. Indeed, when my uncle first urged my going to him, he had more than hinted that he should not expect a premium with his brother’s son. But he was fond of his money (of which he had plenty), and when people are that, they are apt to begin to grudge, if there is time, between promise and performance. Uncle Henry had a whole year in which to think about foregoing two or three hundred pounds, and as it drew to a close, it seemed to worry him to such a degree, that he proposed to take me for half the usual premium instead of completely remitting it; and he said something about my being a stupid sort of boy, and of very little use to him for some time to come. He said it to justify himself for drawing back, I am quite sure, but it did me no good at home.
My father had plenty of honourable pride, and he would hear of no compromise. He said that he should pay the full premium for me that Uncle Henry’s other clerks had had to pay, and from this no revulsion of feeling on my uncle’s part would move him. He was quite bland with Uncle Henry, and he was not quite bland towards me.
When I fairly grasped the situation (and I contrived to get a pretty clear account of it from my mother), there rushed upon me the conviction that a new phase had come over my prospects. When I put aside my own longings for my father’s will; and every time that office life seemed intolerable to me, and I was tempted to break my bonds, and thought better of it and settled down again, this thought had always remained behind: “I will try; and if the worst comes to the worst, and I really cannot settle down into a clerk, I can but run away then.” But circumstances had altered my case, I felt that now I must make up my mind for good and all. My father would have to make some little sacrifices to find the money, and when it was once paid, I could not let it be in vain. Come what might, I must stick to the office then, and for life.
Some weeks passed whilst I was turning this over and over in my mind. I was constantly forgetting things in the office, but Moses Benson helped me out of every scrape. He was kinder and kinder, so that I often felt sorry that I could not feel fonder of him, and that his notions of fun and amusement only disgusted me instead of making us friends. They convinced me of one thing. My dear mother’s chief dread about my going out of my own country was for the wicked ways I might learn in strange lands. A town with an unpronounceable name suggested foreign iniquities to her tender fears, but our own town, where she and everybody we knew bought everything we daily used, did not frighten her at all. I did not tell her, but I was quite convinced myself that I might get pretty deep into mischief in my idle hours, even if I lived within five miles of home, and had only my uncle’s clerks for my comrades.
During these weeks Jem came home for the holidays. He was at a public school now, which many of our friends regarded as an extravagant folly on my father’s part. We had a very happy time together, and this would have gone far to keep me at home, if it had not, at the same time, deepened my disgust with our town, and my companions in the office. In plain English, the training of two good schools, and the society of boys superior to himself, had made a gentleman of Jem, and the contrast between his looks and ways, and manners, and those of my uncle’s clerks were not favourable to the latter. How proud my father was of him! With me he was in a most irritable mood; and one grumble to which I heard him give utterance, that it was very inconvenient to have to pay this money just at the most expensive period of Jem’s education, went heavily into the scale for running away. And that night, as it happened, Jem and I sat up late, and had a long and loving chat. He abused the office to my heart’s content, and was very sympathetic when I told him that I had wished to go to sea, and how my father had refused to allow me.
“I think he made a great mistake,” said Jem; and he told me of “a fellow’s brother” that he knew about, who was in the Merchant Service, and how well he was doing. “It’s not even as if Uncle Henry were coming out generously,” he added.
Dear, dear! How pleasant it was to hear somebody else talk on my side of the question. And who was I that I should rebuke Jem for calling our worthy uncle a curmudgeon, and stigmatising the Jew-clerk as a dirty beast? I really dared not tell him that Moses grew more familiar as my time to be articled drew near; that he called me Jack Sprat, and his dearest friend, and offered to procure me the “silver-top” (or champagne)—which he said I must “stand” on the day I took my place at the fellow desk to his—of the first quality and at less than cost price; and that he had provided me gratis with a choice of “excuses” (they were unblushing lies) to give to our good mother for spending that evening in town, and “having a spree.”
From my affairs we came to talk of Jem’s, and I found that even he, poor chap! was not without his troubles. He confided to me, with many expressions of shame and vexation, that he had got into debt, but having brought home good reports and even a prize on this occasion, he hoped to persuade my father to pay what he owed.
“You see, Jack, he’s awfully good to me, but he will do things his own way, and what’s worse, the way they were done in his young days. You remember the row we had about his giving me an allowance? He didn’t want to, because he never had one, only tips from his governor when the old gentleman was pleased with him. And he said it was quite enough to send me to such a good and expensive school, and I ought to think of that, and not want more because I had got much. We’d an awful row, for I thought it was so unfair his making out I was greedy and ungrateful, and I told him so, and I said I was quite game to go to a cheap school if he liked, only wherever I was I did want to be ‘like the other fellows.’ I begged him to take me away and to let me go somewhere cheap with you; and I said, if the fellows there had no allowances, we could do without. As I told him, it’s not the beastly things that you buy that you care about, only of course you don’t like to be the only fellow who can’t buy ’em. So then he came round, and said I should have an allowance, but I must do with a very small one. So I said, Very well, then I mustn’t go in for the games. Then he wouldn’t have that; so then I made out a list of what the subscriptions are to cricket, and so on, and then your flannels and shoes, and it came to double what he offered me. He said it was simply disgraceful that boys shouldn’t be able to be properly educated, and have an honest game at cricket for the huge price he paid, without the parents being fleeced for all sorts of extravagances at exorbitant prices. And I know well enough it’s disgraceful, what we have to pay for school books and for things of all sorts you have to get in the town; but, as I said to the governor, why don’t you kick up a dust with the head master, or write to the papers—what’s the good of rowing us? One must have what other fellows have, and get ’em where other fellows get ’em. But he never did—I wish he would. I should enjoy fighting old Pompous if I were in his place. But they’re as civil as butter to each other, and then old Pompous goes on feathering his nest, and backing up the tradespeople, and the governor pitches into the young men of the present day.”
“He did give you the bigger allowance, didn’t he?” said I, at this pause in Jem’s rhetoric.
“Yes, he did. He’s awfully good to me. But you know, Jack, he never paid it quite all, and he never paid it quite in time. I found out from my mother he did it on purpose to make me value it more, and be more careful. Doesn’t it seem odd he shouldn’t see that I can’t pay the subscriptions a few shillings short or a few days late? One must find the money somehow, and then one has to pay for that, and then you’re short, and go on tick, and it runs up, and then they dun you, and you’re cleaned out, and there you are!”
At which climax old Jem laid his curly head on his arms, and I began to think very seriously.
“How much do you owe?”
Jem couldn’t say. He thought he could reckon up, so I got a pencil and made a list from his dictation, and from his memory, which was rather vague. When it was done (and there seemed to be a misty margin beyond), I was horrified. “Why, my dear fellow!” I exclaimed, “if you’d had your allowance ever so regularly, it wouldn’t have covered this sort of thing.”
“I know, I know,” said poor Jem, clutching remorsefully at his curls. “I’ve been a regular fool! Jack! whatever you do—never tick. It’s the very mischief. You never know what you owe, and so you feel vague and order more. And you never know what you don’t owe, which is worse, for sometimes you’re in such despair, it would be quite a relief to catch some complaint and die. It’s like going about with a stone round your neck, and nobody kind enough to drown you. I can’t stand any more of it. I shall make a clean breast to Father, and if he can’t set me straight, I won’t go back; I’ll work on the farm sooner, and let him pay my bills instead of my schooling—and serve old Pompous right.”
Poor Jem! long after he had cheered up and gone to bed, I sat up and thought. When my premium was paid where was the money for Jem’s debts to come from? And would my father be in the humour to pay them? If he did not, Jem would not go back to school. Of that I was quite certain. Jem had thought over his affairs, which was an effort for him, but he always thought in one direction. His thoughts never went backwards and forwards as mine did. If he had made up his mind, there was no more prospect of his changing it than if he had been my father. And if the happy terms between them were broken, and Jem’s career checked when he was doing so well!—the scales that weighed my own future were becoming very uneven now.
I clasped my hands and thought. If I ran away, the money would be there for Jem’s debts, and his errors would look pale in the light of my audacity, and he would be dearer than ever at home, whilst for me were freedom, independence (for I had not a doubt of earning bread-and-cheese, if only as a working man): perhaps a better understanding with my father when I had been able to prove my courage and industry, or even when he got the temperate and dutiful letter I meant to post to him when I was fairly off; and beyond all, the desire of my eyes, the sight of the world.
Should I stay now? And for what? To see old Jem at logger-heads with my father, and perhaps demoralized by an inferior school? To turn my own back and shut my eyes for ever on all that the wide seas embrace; my highest goal to be to grow as rich as Uncle Henry or richer, and perhaps as mean or meaner? Should I choose for life a life I hated, and set seals to my choice by drinking silver-top with the Jew-clerk?—No, Moses, no!
I got up soon after dawn and was in the garden at sunrise the morning that I ran away. I had made my plans carefully, and carried them out, so far with success.
Including the old miser’s bequest which his lawyer had paid, there were thirteen pounds to my name in the town savings-bank, and this sum I had drawn out to begin life with. I wrapped a five-pound note in a loving letter to Jem, and put both into the hymn-book on his shelf—I knew it would not be opened till Sunday. Very few runaways have as much as eight pounds to make a start with: and as one could not be quite certain how my father would receive Jem’s confession, I thought he might be glad of a few pounds of his own, and I knew he had spent his share of the miser’s money long ago.
I meant to walk to a station about seven miles distant, and there take train for Liverpool. I should be clumsy indeed, I thought, if I could not stow away on board some vessel, as hundreds of lads had done before me, and make myself sufficiently useful to pay my passage when I was found out.
When I got into the garden I kicked my foot against something in the grass. It was my mother’s little gardening-fork. She had been tidying her pet perennial border, and my father had called her hastily, and she had left it half finished, and had forgotten the fork. A few minutes more or less were of no great importance to me, for it was very early, so I finished the border quite neatly, and took the fork indoors.
I put it in a corner of the hall where the light was growing stronger and making familiar objects clear. In a house like ours and amongst people like us, furniture was not chopped and changed and decorated as it is now. The place had looked like this ever since I could remember, and it would look like this tomorrow morning, though my eyes would not see it. I stood stupidly by the hall table where my father’s gloves lay neatly one upon the other beside his hat. I took them up, almost mechanically, and separated them, and laid them together again finger to finger, and thumb to thumb, and held them with a stupid sort of feeling, as if I could never put them down and go away.
What would my father’s face be like when he took them up this very morning to go out and look for me? and when—oh when!—should I see his face again?
I began to feel what one is apt to learn too late, that in childhood one takes the happiness of home for granted, and kicks against the pricks of its grievances, not having felt the far harder buffetings of the world. Moreover (which one does not think of then), that parental blunders and injustices are the mistakes and tyrannies of a special love that one may go many a mile on one’s own wilful way and not meet a second time. Who—in the wide world—would care to be bothered with my confidence, and blame me for withholding it? Should I meet many people to whom it would matter if we misunderstood each other? Would anybody hereafter love me well enough to be disappointed in me? Would other men care so much for my fate as to insist on guiding it by lines of their own ruling?
I pressed the gloves passionately against my eyes to keep in the tears. If my day-dreams had been the only question, I should have changed my mind now. If the home grievances had been all, I should have waited for time and patience to mend them. I could not have broken all these heart-strings. I should never have run away. But there was much more, and my convictions were not changed, though I felt as if I might have managed better as regards my father.
Would he forgive me? I hoped and believed so. Would my mother forgive me? I knew she would—as God forgives.
And with the thought of her, I knelt down, and put my head on the hall table and prayed from my soul—not for fair winds, and prosperous voyages, and good luck, and great adventures; but that it might please God to let me see Home again, and the faces that I loved, ah, so dearly, after all!
And then I got up, and crossed the threshold, and went out into the world.
END OF PART I.
Richard Clay & Sons, Limited,
London & Bungay.
The present Series of Mrs. Ewing’s Works is the only authorized, complete, and uniform Edition published.
It will consist of 18 volumes, Small Crown 8vo, at 2s. 6d. per vol., issued, as far as possible, in chronological order, and these will appear at the rate of two volumes every two months, so that the Series will be completed within 18 months. The device of the cover was specially designed by a Friend of Mrs. Ewing.
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- MELCHIOR’S DREAM, AND OTHER TALES.
- MRS. OVERTHEWAY’S REMEMBRANCES.
- OLD-FASHIONED FAIRY TALES.
- A FLAT IRON FOR A FARTHING.
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