Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  It is two in the morning, and the young couple have come home crumpled from their dance, and their feet drag dreadfully on the stairs, and the doctor has taken their hansom, and the young man below them is drunk with joy, when Harry Ringrose kisses his mother for the twentieth last time and really goes. But he is too excited to sleep. In half-an-hour he creeps back into the passage. Her light is still burning. He goes in.

  “You spoke of Innes, mother?”

  “Yes; I feel sure he would be the first to help you.”

  “I cannot go to him. I can go to nobody. We must start afresh with fresh friends, and I’ll begin answering advertisements to-morrow. Yet — Innes has helped me already!”

  Mrs. Ringrose has been reading herself asleep, like a practical woman, out of one of the new magazines he has brought home. The sweet face on the pillow is wonderfully calm (for it is not from his mother that Harry inherits his excitability), but at this it looks puzzled.

  “When has he helped you?”

  “To-night, mother! There was a motto he had when I was at his school. He used to say it in his sermons, and he taught me to say it in my heart.”

  “Well, my boy?”

  “It came back to me just now. It puts all that we have been saying in a nutshell. May I tell you, mother?”

  “I am waiting to hear.”

  “‘Money lost — little lost.’”

  “It’s easy to say that.”

  “‘Honour lost — much lost.’”

  “I call it everything.”

  “No, mother, wait! ‘Pluck lost — all lost!’ It’s only pluck that’s everything. We must never lose that, mother, we must never lose that!”

  “God grant we never may.”

  CHAPTER V.

  A WET BLANKET.

  The morning sun filled the front rooms of the flat, and the heavy hearts within were the lighter for its cheery rays. Sorrow may outlive the night, and small joy come in the morning; but yet, if you are young and sanguine, and the month be May, and the heavens unspotted, and the air nectar, then you may suddenly find yourself thrilling with an unwarrantable delight in mere life, and that in the very midst of life’s miseries. It was so with young Harry Ringrose, on the morning following his tragic home-coming; it was even so with Harry’s mother, who was as young at heart as her boy, and fully as sanguine in temperament. They had come down from the high ground of the night. The everyday mood had supervened. Harry was unpacking his ostrich eggs in the narrow passage, and thoroughly enjoying a pipe; in her own room his mother sat cleaning her silver, incredible contentment in her face, because her boy was in and out all the morning, and the little flat was going to bring them so close together.

  “That’s the lot,” said Harry when the bed was covered with the eggs. “Now, mother, which do you think the best pair?”

  “They all look the same to me.”

  “They are not. Look at this pair in my hands. Can’t you see that they’re much bigger and finer than the rest?”

  “I daresay they are.”

  “They’re for you, mother, these two.”

  And he set them on the table among the spoons and forks and plate-powder. She kissed him, but looked puzzled.

  “What shall you do with the rest?”

  “Sell them! Five shillings a pair; five tens are fifty; that’s two-pound-ten straight away.”

  “I won’t have you sell them!”

  “They are mine, mother, and I must.”

  “You’ll be sorry for it when you have a good situation.”

  “Ah, when!” said Harry, and he was out again with a laugh.

  A noise of breaking wood came from the passage. He was opening another case. His mother frowned at her miniature in the spoon she had in hand, and when he returned, brandishing a brace of Kaffir battle-axes, she would hardly look at them.

  “I feel sure Wintour Phipps would take you into his office,” said Mrs. Ringrose.

  “I never heard of him. Who is he?”

  “A solicitor; your father paid for his stamps when he was articled.”

  “An old friend, then?”

  “Not of mine, for I never saw him; but he was your father’s godson.”

  “It comes to the same thing, and I can’t go to him, mother. Face old friends I cannot! You and I are starting afresh, dear; I’m prepared to answer every advertisement in the papers, and to take any work I can get, but not to go begging favours of people who would probably cut us in the street. I don’t expect to get a billet instantly; that’s why I mean to sell all this truck — for the benefit of the firm.”

  “You had much better write an article about your experiences, and get it into some magazine, as you said you would last night.”

  Indeed, they had discussed every possible career in the night, among others that of literature, which the mother deemed her son competent to follow on the strength of certain contributions to his school magazine, and of the winning parody in some prize competition of ancient history. He now said he would try his hand on the article some day, but it would take time, and would anybody accept it when written? That was the question, said Harry, and his mother had a characteristic answer.

  “If you wrote to the Editor of Uncle Tom’s Magazine,” said she, “and told him you had taken it in as long as you could remember — I bought in the bound volumes for you, my boy — I feel sure that he would accept it and pay for it too.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” said Harry, with a laugh. “Meanwhile we must find somebody to accept all these curios, and to pay for them. I see no room for them here.”

  “There is certainly very little.”

  “I wonder who would be the best people to go to?”

  Mrs. Ringrose considered.

  “I should try Whitbreds,” said she at last, “since you are so set upon it. They sell everything; and I have had all my groceries from them for so many years that they can hardly refuse to take something from us.”

  To the simple-hearted lady, whom fifty years had failed to sophisticate, there seemed nothing unreasonable in the expectations which she formed of others, for they were one and all founded upon the almost fanatical loyalty which was a guiding impulse of her own warm heart. In her years of plenty it was ever the humblest friend who won her warmest welcome, and the lean years to come proved powerless to check this generous spirit. Mrs. Ringrose would be illogically staunch to tradesmen whom she had dealt with formerly, and would delight their messengers with unnecessary gratuities because she had been accustomed to give all her life; but so unconscious was she of undue liberality on her part that she was apt to credit others with her own extravagance in charity, and to feel it bitterly when not done by as perhaps she alone would have done. It simply astounded her when three of her husband’s old friends, who had in no way suffered by him, successively refused her secret supplication for a desk for her boy in their offices: she would herself have slept on the floor to have given the child of any one of them a bed in her little flat.

  But the treadmill round in search of work was not yet begun, though Harry was soon enough to find himself upon the wheel. Even as he unpacked his native weapons a weighty step was ascending the common stair, and the electric bell rang long and aggressively just as Mrs. Ringrose decided that it would be worth her son’s while to let his trophies go for fifty pounds.

  “A tall man in a topper!” whispered Harry, bursting quietly in. “I saw him through the ground glass; who can it be?”

  “Your Uncle Spencer,” said Mrs. Ringrose, looking straight at Harry over the wash-leather and the mustard-pot.

  “Uncle Spencer!” Harry looked aghast. “What’s bringing him, mother?”

  “I wrote to him directly I got the telegram.”

  “You never said so!”

  “No; I knew you wouldn’t be pleased.”

  “Need I see him?”

  “It is you he has come to see. Go, my boy; take him into the sitting-room, and I will join you when you have had your talk. Meanwhile, remember that he
is your mother’s brother, and will exert his influence to get you a situation; he has come so promptly, I shouldn’t be surprised if he has got you one already! And you are letting him ring twice!”

  Indeed, the avuncular thumb had already pressed the button longer than was either necessary or polite, and Harry went to the door with feelings which he had difficulty in concealing as he threw it open. Uncle Spencer stood without in a stiff attitude and in sombre clerical attire; he beheld his nephew without the glimmer of a smile on his funereal, bearded countenance, while his large hand was slow in joining Harry’s, and its pressure perfunctory.

  “So sorry to keep you waiting, but — but I forgot we hadn’t a servant,” fibbed Harry to be polite. “Do come in, Uncle Spencer.”

  “I thought nobody could be at home,” was the one remark with which the clergyman entered; and Harry sighed as he heard that depressing voice again.

  The Reverend Spencer Walthew was indeed the survival of a type of divine now rare in the land, but not by any means yet extinct. His waistcoat fastened behind his back in some mysterious manner, and he never smiled. He was the vicar of a semi-fashionable parish in North London, where, however, he preached in a black gown to empty pews, while a mixed choir behaved abominably behind his back. As a man he was neither fool nor hypocrite, but the natural enemy of pleasure and enthusiasm, and one who took a grim though unconscious satisfaction in disheartening his neighbour. No two proverbial opposites afford a more complete contrast than was presented by Mr. Walthew and Mrs. Ringrose; and yet at the bottom of the brother’s austerity there lay one or two of the sister’s qualities, for those who cared to dig deep enough in such stony and forbidding ground.

  Harry had never taken to his uncle, who had frowned on Lord’s and tabooed the theatre on the one occasion of his spending a part of his holidays in North London; and Mr. Walthew was certainly the last person he wanted to see that day. It made Harry Ringrose throb and tingle to look on the clergyman and to think of his father; they had never been friendly together; and if one syllable was said against the man who was down — no matter what he had done — the son of that man was prepared to make such a scene as should secure an immunity from further insult. But here Harry was indulging in fears as unworthy as his determination, and he was afterwards ashamed of both.

  The clergyman began in an inevitable strain, dwelling solemnly on the blessing of adversity in general, before proceeding to point out that the particular misfortunes which had overwhelmed Harry and his mother could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be regarded as adventitious or accidental, since they were obviously the deliberate punishment of a justly irate God, and as such to be borne with patience, meekness, and humility. Harry chafed visibly, thinking of his innocent mother in the next room; but, to do the preacher justice, his sermon was a short one, and the practical issue was soon receiving the attention it deserved.

  “I understand, Henry,” said Mr. Walthew, “that you did obtain some useful and remunerative employment in Africa, which you threw up in order to come home and enjoy yourself. It is, of course, a great pity that you were so ill-advised and improvident; but may I ask in what capacity you were employed, and at what salary?”

  “I don’t admit that I was either ill-advised or improvident,” cried Harry, with disrespectful warmth. “I didn’t go out to work, but for my health, and I only worked for the fun of it, and am jolly glad I did come back to take care of my mother and to work for her. I was tutor in a Portuguese planter’s family, and he gave me seventy pounds a year.”

  “And your board?”

  “And my board.”

  “It was very good. It is a great deal better than anything you are likely to get here. How long were you with the planter?”

  “Ten months.”

  “Only ten months! You must allow an older head than yours to continue thinking it is a pity you are not there still. Now, as to money matters, your father would doubtless cease sending you remittances once you were earning money for yourself?”

  “No, he sent me fifty pounds last Christmas.”

  “Then, at any rate, you have brought enough home to prevent your being a burden to your mother? Between fifty and a hundred pounds, I take it?”

  Harry shook his head; it was hot with a shame he would have owned to anybody in the world but Mr. Walthew.

  “Not fifty pounds?”

  “No.”

  “How much, then?”

  “Not a penny!”

  The clergyman opened his eyes and lifted his hands in unaffected horror. Harry could not help smiling in his face — could not have helped it if he had stood convicted of a worse crime than extravagance.

  “You have spent every penny — and you smile!” the uncle cried. “You come home to find your mother at starvation’s door — and you smile! You have spent her substance in — in — —”

  “Riot!” suggested Harry wickedly. “Sheer riot and evil living! Oh, Uncle Spencer, don’t look like that; it’s not exactly true; but, can’t you see, I had no idea what was going to happen here at home? I thought I was coming back to live on the fat of the land, and when I’d made my miserable pile I spent it — like a man, I thought — like a criminal, if you will. Whichever it was, you must know which I feel now. And whatever I have done I am pretty badly punished. But at least I mean to take my punishment like a man, and to work like one, too, at any mortal thing I can find to do.”

  Mr. Walthew looked down his nose at the carpet on which he stood. He had sense enough to see that the lad was in earnest now, and that it was of no use to reproach him further with what was past.

  “It seems to me, Henry,” he said at length, “that it’s a case of ability rather than of will. You say you are ready to do anything; the question is — what can you do?”

  “Not many things,” confessed Henry, in a humbler voice; “but I can learn, Uncle Spencer — I will do my best to learn.”

  “How old are you, Henry?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  Harry was about to add “yesterday,” but refrained from making his statement of fact an appeal for sympathy; for the man in him was coming steadily to the front.

  “Then you would leave school in the Sixth Form?”

  Harry had to shake his head.

  “Perhaps you were on the Modern Side? All the better if you were!”

  “No, I was not; I left in the form below the Sixth.”

  “Then you know nothing about book-keeping, for example?”

  “I wish I did.”

  “But you are a fair mathematician?”

  “It was my weakest point.”

  The clergyman’s expression was more melancholy than ever. “It is a great pity — a very great pity, indeed,” said he. “However, I see writing materials on the table, and shall be glad if you will write me down your full name, age, and address.”

  Harry sat down and wrote what was required of him in the pretty, rather scholarly hand which looked like and was the imitation of a prettier and more scholarly one. Then he unsuspectingly blotted the sheet and handed it to Mr. Walthew, who instantly began shaking his head in the most depressing fashion.

  “It is as I feared,” said he; “you do not even write a fair commercial hand. It is well enough at a distance,” and he held the sheet at arm’s length, “but it is not too easy to read, and I fear it would never do in an office. There are several City men among my parishioners; I had hoped to go to one or two of them with a different tale, but now I fear — I greatly fear. However, one can but try. You do not fancy any of the professions, I suppose? Not that you could afford one if you did.”

  “Are the fees so high?” asked poor Harry, in a broken-spirited voice.

  “High enough to be prohibitive in your case, though it might not be so if you had saved your money,” the clergyman took care to add. “Of which particular profession were you thinking?”

  “We — we have been talking it all over, and we did speak of — the Law.”

  “Out of the q
uestion; it would cost hundreds, and you wouldn’t make a penny for years.”

  “Then there is — schoolmastering.”

  “It leads to nothing; besides — excuse me, Henry — but do you think you are scholar enough yourself to — to presume to — teach others?”

  Harry fetched a groan.

  “I don’t know. I managed well enough in Mozambique, but it was chiefly teaching English. I only know that I would work day and night to improve myself, if once I could get a chance.”

  “Well,” said Uncle Spencer, “it is just possible that I may hear in my parish of some delicate or backward boy whom you would be competent to ground, and if so I shall recommend you as far as I conscientiously can. But I cannot say I am sanguine, Henry; it would be a different thing if you had worked harder at school and got into the Sixth Form. I suppose no other career has occurred to you as feasible? I confess I find the range sadly restricted by the rather discreditable limitations to which you own.”

  Another career had occurred to Harry, and it was the one to which he felt most drawn, but by inclination rather than by conscious aptitude, so that he would have said nothing about it had not Mrs. Ringrose joined them at this moment. Her brother greeted her with a tepid salute, then dryly indicated the drift of the conversation, enlarging upon the vista of hopeless disability which it had revealed in Henry, and concluding with a repetition of his last question.

  “No,” said Harry rather sullenly, “I can think of nothing else I’m fit for unless I sweep a crossing; and then you would say I hadn’t money for the broom!”

  “But, surely, my boy,” cried his mother, “you have forgotten what you said to me last night?”

  Harry frowned and glared, for it is one thing to breathe your ridiculous aspirations to the dearest of mothers in the dead of night, and quite another thing to confide them to a singularly unsympathetic uncle in broad daylight. But Mrs. Ringrose had turned to her brother, and she would go on: “There is one thing he tells me he would rather do than anything else in the world — and I am sure he could do it best.”