"If you love me," she whispered, "will you ask no more questions of me – or of anybody? They will not bring your father back. They may only implicate – my ather – just as he is coming through his hard, hard struggles. Can you not leave it in the hands of Providence – for my sake? It is all I ask; and I think – if you do – it may all come right – some day."
"With you?" he cried. "With you and me?"
"Who knows?" she answered. "You may not care for me so long; but when there are no more mysteries – well, yes – perhaps."
"Shall I ever see you meanwhile?"
"Not until there are no more mysteries – or quarrels."
"Yet you will not let me try to clear them up."
"I want you to leave them in the hands of Providence – for my sake."
"It is hard!"
"But if you love me you will promise."
The cab was still waiting in the mist. Harry sprang into it, wild with unhidden grief, as one fresh from a death-bed. His perplexity was returning – his conscience was beginning to gnaw – yet one difficulty was solved.
He had promised.
A hansom stood at the curb below the flats; the porter was taking down the luggage; a lady and a gentleman were on the stairs.
"I hope, for every reason, that we shall find him in," the gentleman was saying. "If not I must wait a little, for I feel that a few words from me may be of value to him at this juncture, quite apart from the little proposal I have to make."
"I would not count on his accepting it," the lady ventured to observe.
"My dear Mary – "
Uncle Spencer got no further. Harry's arms were round his mother's neck. And in a few moments they were all three in the flat, where the porter's wife had the fires lighted and everything comfortable in response to a telegram from Mrs. Ringrose.
"But we must have the gas lit," cried the lady. "I want to look at you, my dear, and I cannot in this fog."
"It'll keep, mother, it'll keep," said Harry, who had his own reasons for not courting a close inspection.
"I quite agree with Henry," said Mr. Walthew. "To light the gas before it is actually dark is an extravagance which I cannot afford. I do not permit it in my house, Mary." Harry promptly struck a match.
"Come, my boy, and let me have a look at you," said Mrs. Ringrose when the blinds were drawn. She drew his face close to hers. "Let him say what he likes," she whispered: "I have been with them all this time. Never mind, my darling," she cried aloud; "it must have been a horrid place, and I am thankful to have you back."
Mr. Walthew prepared to say what he liked, his pulpit the hearthrug, and his theme the fiasco of the day before.
"I must say, Mary, that your sentiments are astounding. Naturally he looks troubled. He has lost the post it took him four months to secure. I confess, Henry, that I, for my part, was less surprised this morning than when I heard you had obtained your late situation. With the very serious limitations which I learnt from your own lips, however, you could scarcely hope to hold your own in a scholastic avocation. I told you so, in effect, at the time, if you remember. Was it the Greek or the mathematics that caused your downfall?"
Harry had not said what it was in his letter. He now explained, with a grim smile as he thought of Mangnall's Questions and Little Steps to Great Events. He described Scrafton's brutality in a few words, and in fewer still the scene of the day before. His mother's indignation was even louder than her applause. Uncle Spencer looked horrified at them both.
"So it was insubordination!" cried he. "You took the side of the boys against their master and your elder! Really, Henry, there is no more to be said. Your mother's sympathy I consider most misplaced. I tell you frankly that you need expect none from me."
"Did I say I expected any, Uncle Spencer?"
"That," said Mr. Walthew, "is a remark worthy of your friend Mr. Lowndes, the most impudent fellow I ever met in my life."
"He is no longer a friend of mine," said Harry Ringrose.
"I am glad to hear it, Henry."
"Do you mean that you have quarrelled?" cried Mrs. Ringrose.
"For good, mother; you shall hear about it afterwards. I can't forgive a liar, and no more must you. I have bowled Lowndes out in a thundering lie – and told him what I thought of him – that's all."
Mrs. Ringrose looked troubled, but inquisitive for particulars. Her brother did not smile, but for an instant his expression ceased to be that of a professional mute.
"'Liar' and 'lie,'" said he, "are stronger language than I approve of, Henry; but if anybody deserves such epithets I feel sure it is Mr. Gordon Lowndes. The man impressed me as a falsehood-teller when he came to my house, and I feel sure that the prospectus of this new Crofter Company, which reached me this morning, is nothing but a tissue of untruths from beginning to end. A thoroughly bad man, Henry, a lost and irredeemable sinner, who might have dragged you with him to fire eternal!"
"I did not find him thoroughly bad, Uncle Spencer," said his nephew civilly. "On the contrary, I believe there is more good in him than in most of us; but – you can't depend upon him, and there you are."
"Yet you would defend him!" exclaimed Mr. Walthew, with a sneer. "Well, well, I have no time to argue with you, Henry; my time is precious, so may I ask how you propose to fill yours now? You have tried and failed for the City; you have tried and failed for the Law; and now you have tried schoolmastering, and failed still more conspicuously. What do you think of trying next?"
"Something that I have been trying for some time without failing so badly as at the other things."
"Literature!" cried Mrs. Ringrose.
"Literature, forsooth!" echoed the clergyman, before Harry had time to repudiate the word. "I suppose, Mary, that you are alluding to the productions you have shown me in the paper with the unspeakable name? Well, Henry, if that's your literature, let's say no more about it; only I am almost sorry you did not fail there, too. You cannot, however, devote all or even much of your time to such buffoonery, and it was to speak to you about some permanent occupation that I accompanied your mother this afternoon. What should you say to the Civil Service?"
"I couldn't possibly get into it, uncle."
"Into the higher branches you certainly could not, Henry. But a second-class clerkship in one of the lower branches I think you might obtain, with ordinary application and perseverance. I am only sorry it did not occur to me before."
"What are the lower branches?" asked Harry, doubtfully.
"The Excise and the Customs are two."
"And the salary?"
"From eighty-five to two hundred pounds in the Excise, which is the service I recommend. I have been making inquiries about it this morning. A parishioner of mine is sending his son in for it. The lad is to attend classes at Exeter Hall, under the auspices of the Young Men's Christian Association, and I understand that mensuration is the only really difficult subject. What I propose to do, Henry, is to present you to-morrow with a ticket for the course of these classes which commences next week."
"You are very kind, Uncle Spencer – "
Mr. Walthew waved his hand as though not totally unaware of it.
"But – "
"But what?" cried Uncle Spencer.
"I believe before very, very long I should make as much money with my pen."
"You decline my offer?"
"I am exceedingly grateful for it."
"Yet you elect to go on writing rubbish for an extremely vulgar paper for the rest of your days."
"Not for the rest of my days, I hope, Uncle Spencer. I mean it to be a stepping-stone to better things."
"So you think you can earn eighty-five pounds a year by your pen!" sneered the clergyman, buttoning up his overcoat.
"I mean to try," said Harry, provoked into a firmer tone.
"Is this your deliberate decision?"
"It is."
"Then I am sorry I wasted my time by coming so far to hold out a helping hand to you. It is the last time, Henry. You may go your own way after this. Only, when your pen brings you to the poorhouse, don't come to me – that's all!"
Harry contrived to keep his temper without effort. Pinpricks do not hurt a man with a mortal wound. As for Mrs. Ringrose, she had fled before the proposal which she knew was coming, and of the result of which she felt equally sure. But she came to her door to bid the offended clergyman good-bye, and at last her boy and she were alone. He flung his arms round her neck.
"I am never going to leave you again!" he cried passionately. "I am not going to look for any more work. I am going to stop at home and write for T.T. until I can teach myself to write something better. I am going to work for you and for us both. I am going to do my work beside you, and you're going to help me. We ought never to have separated. Nothing shall ever separate us again!"
"Until you marry," murmured Mrs. Ringrose.
"I will never marry!" cried her boy.
CHAPTER XXIV
YOUNG INK
So it was that Harry Ringrose took finally to his pen towards the close of the most momentous year of his existence; for four years from that date there was but one sort of dramatic interest in his life. There was the dramatic interest of the electric bell; and that was all.
In the early days, when the roll of the little steel drum broke a silence or cut short a speech, the eyes of mother and son would meet involuntarily with the same look. Her needles would cease clicking. His pen would spring from the unfinished word. Each had the other's thought, and neither uttered it. Many a man had fled the country in his panic, to pluck up courage and return in his cooler senses. Many a man effaced himself for a time, but few for ever. The ironmaster's last letter confessed flight and promised self-effacement. He might have thought better of it – that might be he at the bell. One of the two within got over this feeling in time; the other never did.
The dogged plodder at the desk endured other heartburnings of which the little steel drum beat the signal. Knockers these flats had not, and the postman usually rang a second before he thrust the letter through the door. It was a breathless second for Harry Ringrose. He developed an incredibly fine ear for what came through. He was never deceived in the thud of a rejected manuscript. He used to vow that a proof fell with peculiar softness, and, later, that a press-cutting was unmistakable because you could not hear it fall. He had an essay on the subject in his second book, published when he was twenty-five.
His first book had been one of the minor successes of its season. It had made a small, a very small, name for Harry, but had developed his character more than his fame. It is an ominous coincidence, however, that in conception his first book was as barefaced and as cold-blooded as his first verses in Uncle Tom's Magazine.
For nearly three years he had been writing up, for as many guineas as possible, those African anecdotes which he had brought home with him for conversational purposes. In this way he had wasted much excellent material, to which, however, he was not too proud to return when he knew better. Heaven knows how many times he used the lion in the moonlight and his friend the Portuguese murderer of Zambesi blacks. One would have thought – he thought himself – that he had squeezed the last drop from his African orange, when one fine day he saw the way to make the pulp pay better than the juice. It was not his own way. It was the way of the greatest humorist then living. Harry took the whole of his two years abroad, and eyed them afresh from that humorist's point of view, as he apprehended it. He saw the things the great man would have seized upon, and the way it seemed to Harry he would have treated them. The result was a comic lion in the moonlight, and a more or less amusing murderer. He had treated these things tragically hitherto.
The book purported to be fact, and was certainly not fiction, for which, indeed, our young author had no definite aptitude. It earned him an ambiguous compliment from various reviewers who insisted on dubbing him the English So-and-so; but it was lucky for Harry that the new humour was then an unmade phrase. His humour was not new, but that would not have saved it from the category. It was keen enough, however, in its way, and not too desperately subtle for the man on the knifeboard. Yet Harry's first book, after "going" for a few weeks, showed a want of staying power, and was but a very moderate success after all. A few papers hailed Mr. Ringrose as the humorist for whom England had been sighing since the death of Charles Dickens, and predicted that his book would be the book of the season and of many seasons to come. Such enthusiasm was inevitable from organs which let loose at least one genius a week; but Harry did not realise the inevitability all at once. For a week or two he could not give his name in a shop without a wholly unnecessary blush; while he took his mother to look at empty houses in West End squares, thanks to indiscriminate praise from irresponsible quarters. On the whole, however, Harry had no reason to complain of the treatment accorded to his first-born; and, to descend to lower details, he sold the copyright for a small sum, which was, nevertheless, quite as much as the publishers could possibly have made out of it.
But it was in indirect ways that this book did most for Harry Ringrose. It made new friends for him at a time when his acquaintance was badly in need of some fresh blood. Years of immersion in solitary work must narrow and may warp a man; and the almost exclusive companionship of his dear mother, whose only interest he was in the present, and who vastly overrated his merits, was a joy too great not to be purchased at a price. It kept the lad's heart tender and his life of fair report, but it tended to monopolise his sympathies, and it did not increase his knowledge of the outside world. In the world of letters he had made but one friend in those first three years. This was a youth of Harry's own age, who, with a board-school education, was on the staff of an evening paper, in a position which the public-school boy was certainly not competent to fill. Harry stormed this fortress with a little article on "Portuguese Africa" – which the Editor would label "By an Afrikander" – and the acquaintance was struck up outside that gentleman's door. It ripened in a bar to which the young fellows used to repair whenever Harry was in the Strand. There, over a glass of bitter – or two – or three – he used to hear at first hand of the great novelists whom he longed to meet, but with whom his friend the journalist seemed on enviable terms. It was merely that the latter was in the heart of the big game, whereas Harry was playing a very little game of his own, in an exceedingly remote corner of the field.
His book was not a huge success, but it succeeded well enough to take him out of his corner. His friend the journalist (who managed to review the thing himself in his paper) wrote to tell Harry of a distinguished lady who was so enchanted with it that she begged him to take the author to see her. Harry had no means of knowing that the lady's enchantment was as chronic as the enthusiasm of the paper which had hailed him as a genius, and that the demand was not for himself, but for the latest name. He was still a very simple-minded person, and he waited on this lady with all alacrity, and under her wing made his bow in the sort of society of which he had heard with envy in the Gaiety bar. It cannot be said, however, that he did anybody much credit; he had been too long in his corner, and had an awkward manner when not perfectly at home. Yet a number of other ladies asked him to go and see them, and one invited him to dinner at her smart house – where the wretched Harry distinguished himself by freezing into a solid block of self-consciousness and hardly opening his mouth.
But it was all very valuable experience, and, instead of two or three, he knew a good many people by the end of that winter. He became a member of a club, and got on intimate terms with men whose names and work had become familiar to him in these years. They enlarged his sympathies – they extended his boundaries on every side. And they made him know himself as he had not known himself before. All at once he realised that he had fewer interests than other men, that his nose had been too close to his own grindstone, that the mind he had been slaving to develop had grown narrow in the process. It was a rather bitter discovery, until one day it struck him there was another side to narrowness, and he sat down and began his "Plea for Narrow Minds" on the spot. This article secured a better place in the periodicals than anything Harry Ringrose had then written. It attracted some attention during the month of its appearance, and even on republication in his second book. But it was generally considered a frivolous adventure in mere paradox (on a par with a companion paper "On Enjoying Bad Health"), whereas it was really a reaction against the writer's own self-criticism.
"Cant is not necessarily humbug," declared our scribe, "and there is probably less hypocrisy in the cant of breadth than in any other kind of cant. It may spring from a laudable ambition to be on the side of the good angels in all things. But it is apt to crystallise in a pose. For my part, when I meet a typically broad-minded man, who sees good in everybody and merit in everything, either I suspect his sincerity or I doubt his depth. I want to know if he is saying (a) what he thinks, or (b) what he thinks he ought to think. Either he is insincere and a prig, or he means what he says and is shallow. Those wonderfully wide sympathies are too often sympathy spread thin. The odds are against your being very deep as well as very broad."
There were those critics who remarked that the sapient essayist came under both his own categories, whereupon Harry lay awake all night wondering whether he did. And it was "A Plea for Narrow Minds" that drew from Miss Lowndes the letter which she never posted, but which came into Harry's hands long afterwards. She agreed with him in part, but by no means on the whole; in fact, her letter was a remonstrance, written impulsively in a dainty boudoir of Berkeley Square, and found long afterwards in an escritoire. Harry often wondered whether the woman he loved ever read what he wrote. She read everything he signed, and would never have dropped Tommy Tiddler had she dreamt he was still a comic singer in its columns. But Harry saw nothing and heard but little of his quondam friends. He knew they lived in Berkeley Square – he knew they were very rich. He had heard of the dividend the Crofter Fisheries were paying, and what he would have to give now for the shares which he had committed to the flames. He had also read Truth's opinion of the concern, and wondered why the action for so obvious a libel hung fire. He sometimes wondered, too, how it was that he never met either the father or the daughter from whom he had severed with such different emotions on the same thick November day. He did not know that the daughter once fled from a party on hearing he was expected – and was sorry afterwards.
Curiously enough, the very article which failed to gain the good opinion he coveted most, was so fortunate as to secure that of Harry's most severe and least respected critic. The Reverend Spencer Walthew read religion between the lines, and, having written to thank his nephew for his spirited though veiled attack on the Broad Church party, concluded by begging him to have a go at the Ritualists.
"I have seldom had a more unexpected pleasure," wrote the Evangelical divine, "than you have given me by this shrewd blow against the vice of tolerance and the ultra-charitable spirit which I regard as one of the great dangers of the age. We want no charity for the heretic and the ritualist – with whom I trust you will deal unmercifully without delay. I cannot conclude, Henry, without telling you what a relief it is to me to see you at last turning your attention to serious subjects. I feel sure that they are the only ones worthy of a Christian's pen. I have never concealed from you my pain and disgust at the levity of almost all your writings hitherto, although I have tried to do justice to the literary quality, which, on the whole, has been distinctly better than might have been expected. It is the greater pleasure to me, therefore, to recognise the serious purpose and the lofty aim of your latest essay. May you never again descend to 'humorous' accounts of your 'adventures,' or to inferior versifying for papers which are not to be seen in respectable houses!"
Harry, however, had never ceased his connection with the Tiddler, although it was not one of the things he mentioned to the notorious interviewer who came to patronise him in those days, and to whom he caught his mother showing the parody on Gray's Elegy. T.T. had been a good friend to Harry at the foot of the hill, and he was not going to desert just yet, even if he could have afforded to do so. Of the £51 10s. 9d. which he managed to make in the first year, £34 4s. was from the Tiddler's coffers; of the third year's £223 14s. 6d. (a mighty leap from the intermediate year), £55 12s. was from the same genial source. And so we find him towards the end of the fourth year – not quite such a good one as the last – fighting hard to touch the second hundred for the second time, and writing verses in his pyjamas at midnight at the close of a long day's work on an ungrateful book.
The flat is no longer that in which Harry Ringrose found his mother; it is a slightly larger one in the same mansions on a higher floor; and instead of Weber's Last Waltz, a lusty youth, who arrived there on the same night as Harry, supplies the unsolicited accompaniment inseparable from life in a flat.
Only one room has been gained by the change; but in it sleeps a servant, an old retainer of the family; and the sitting-room is larger, so that there is ample room in it for the rather luxurious desk which Harry has bought himself, and at which we find him seated, his back to the books and his nose in his rhyming dictionary, taking his most trivial task seriously, as was ever his wont, on a warm night in the middle of September.
He is a little altered – not much. He is thicker set; the legs in the pyjamas are less lean. His face is older, but still extremely young. He has tried to grow a moustache, but failed, and given it up; and the two blots of whisker show that he has no candid girl friend now; and the blue stubble on his chin means that his mother is away. His black hair inclines to length, not altogether because he thinks it looks interesting, but chiefly because he has been too busy to get it cut. He has not yet affected the pince-nez or the spectacles of the average literary man. But he is smoking at his desk; he will be smoking presently in his bed; and on a small table stand a bottle of whisky and a syphon.
Suddenly a ring at the bell.
At half-past twelve at night a prolonged tattoo on the little steel drum!
Harry was greatly startled, as a man may easily be who is working at night after working all day. Yet he would have been much more startled the September before.
Since then his books had come out, and he had made a number of friends. Only the night before a play-actor had looked in after his "show," and they had sat up reading Keats against Shelley, and capping Swinburne with Rossetti, until the whisky was finished and daylight shamed them in their cups. Harry thoroughly enjoyed a Bohemian life in his mother's absence, though indeed she let him do exactly as he liked when she was there. Was it the actor again, or was it…
Not for months had the old fancy seized him with the ringing of the bell. It was only the lateness of the hour which brought it back to-night. Yet the look with which the young fellow rose was one that he wore often enough when there were none to see. It was a look of utter misery barbed with shame unspeakable and undying. Sometimes the mother had seen it – and taken the shame and the misery for his share of their common hidden grief. She little knew!
The gas was burning in the passage, but lowered on the common landing outside. Harry could see nothing through the ground glass which formed the upper portion of the door. He flung it open. A tall man was standing on the mat.
"Good evening, Mr. Ringrose," said he, and took a tremendous pinch of snuff as Harry drew back in dismay.
It was Jeremiah Scrafton.