Lettice

“And where do you think of going in the first place?” asked Mr Winthrop.

“To Hexton,” said the young man, naming the town he had been making for, before his misadventure, “and from there to Liverpool. I thought I would try in Liverpool to get something to do, and if I did not succeed, I thought perhaps I would go to America.”

“And how would you get there? Have you money?”

“I have a little that I left behind me in the charge of a friend to send after me with my clothes when I get to Liverpool. I thought it better not to carry it with me; I might have been robbed, or,” – and here he smiled again the same wintry little smile that seemed so pathetic on his thin young face – “tempted to spend it, perhaps.”

“And have you any one to go to at Liverpool – any introductions of any kind?”

“No one – none, whatever,” answered the poor boy sadly.

Mr Winthrop reflected a moment.

“I may be able to be of a little use to you in that way; at least, I might be if I knew even a little more about you. You cannot tell me your name?”

The young man coloured and looked down.

“I cannot,” he said. “I thought it all over, and I determined that my only chance was to tell nothing. No, sir, you cannot help me; but I thank you as much as if you had.”

And thus Mr Winthrop was forced to let him go. At the last moment an idea struck him. He gave the boy a few words of introduction to an old friend of his in Liverpool – a friend, though in a different rank of life – the son of a farmer in the neighbourhood, now holding a respectable position in a business house there, telling him all, or rather the exceedingly little, he knew of the stranger who had been three days his guest, and asking him if under the circumstances he could do anything to help, to do it.

“At the same time,” he said to the young man, “I really do not know that this will be of any service. I cannot ask Mr Simcox to take any responsibility in the matter. You have not even told me your name.”

“I know that,” replied the youth dejectedly, “but I cannot help it. I cannot expect others to take me on trust as generously as you have done.” And so saying he set off on his lonely journey, with kindly words from Daisy and her mother, the two boys accompanying him to the high-road.

The snow still lay on the ground, and Tom’s wish for a prolonged frost seemed likely to be fulfilled.

“We shall have splendid skating in a day or two,” he remarked to “the gentleman tramp,” as he and Ralph had dubbed the stranger. “Our pond isn’t very big, but it’s very good ice generally. You should see the lake at Uncle Ingram’s; that’s the best place, I know, for skating in England.”

The young man started at the name Tom mentioned.

“Where did you say?” he asked.

“At my uncle Ingram’s – Mr Morison’s,” said Tom. “It’s a long way from here.”

“But your name isn’t Morison. How can he be your uncle?”

“Why, his wife is our aunt. He married mamma’s sister. Uncles are often uncles that way,” said Tom with an air of superior wisdom.

“Of course,” said the young man; “how stupid of me.”

“Well, don’t be stupid about losing your way again,” said the boy patronisingly. “Look here now, here’s the high-road; you’ve nothing to do but go straight on for some hours – two or three – and when you come to a place where four roads meet, you’ll see ‘Clough’ marked on a finger-post. You can easily get there to-night.”

“Thank you; thank you very much,” said the stranger; and, as the boys turned from him, “Please thank your father and mother again for me,” he called out after them.

“He must be a gentleman,” said Ralph. “He speaks quite like one.”

“Of course he is,” said Tom. “But he’s rather queer. He was so stupid about Uncle Ingram. I wonder what he’s left his friends for.”

“P’raps,” said Ralph sagely, “he’d got a cruel stepmother that starved and beat him, like Hop-o’-my-Thumb, you know.”

“Nonsense,” reproved Tom. “That’s all fairy story rubbish; and you know papa says it’s very wrong to talk about cruel stepmothers, and that you’re not to read any more fairy stories if you mix them up with real.”

“Or,” pursued Ralph, sublimely indifferent to this elder-brotherly reproof, “it might have been a cruel uncle, like the babes in the wood’s uncle. And that’s not a fairy story —there,” he threw at Tom triumphantly.

Many a true word is spoken in jest!

Little thought the two light-hearted boys as they made their way back over the crisp, glittering snow to the happy, cheerful Rectory, how the words “uncle,” “my uncle Ingram,” kept ringing in the ears of the solitary traveller, but little older than they, as he pursued his weary journey. For in a sense it was truly from an uncle, or the distorted image of one, that he was fleeing.

“Uncle Ingram to be their uncle. How extraordinary!” he kept saying to himself. “And how near I was more than once to telling my name. If I had – supposing I had got very ill and delirious and had told it – it would all have come out. It would not have been my fault then. Lettice could not have reproached me, or written me any more of those dreadful letters;” and a sigh, almost a shiver, of suffering went through him as he thought of them. “If I had died, they would have had to hunt among my things, and they would have found my name. I think it would have been better. Perhaps Lettice would have been sorry; any way, it would have come to an end, and poor Nina would have been happier. Lettice could not speak to her as she has done to me. But I must not begin thinking. I must go on with it now.”

He had no misadventures that day, and reached the town he was bound for by the evening. There he looked about till he saw a modest little inn, where he put up for the night, remembering Mr Winthrop’s advice to play no tricks with himself in such severe weather, and when still not fully recovered from his exposure to the snowstorm.

It was the day but one before Christmas. Poor Arthur’s eyes filled with tears as he sat trying to warm himself on a bench at some little distance from the fire in the rough room of the inn, where a motley enough company of passers-by – small farmers from the neighbourhood, some of the inferior grades of commercial travellers, one or two nondescript figures, looking like wandering showmen, and a few others, were assembled, some talking, some silent, mostly smoking, and all getting as near the fire as they could, for it was again bitterly cold. What a contrast from last Christmas! Then, ill though their mother was, she had not seemed much worse than she had been for long, and had done her utmost to be cheerful for her children’s sake. Arthur recalled the pleasant little drawing-room at the Villa Martine, the bright sunshine and lovely blue sky – for the short, though often even in those climates sharp, winter had not set in till January – which almost seemed to laugh at the usual associations of Christmas. His brighter hopes, too, for he had not yet realised his distaste and unfitness for his chosen profession, and even if misgiving had now and then crossed his mind, there was his mother to confide in, should it ever take form.

“I can’t believe mamma would have been so hard on me,” he said to himself. “She might have been disappointed, but she wouldn’t have thought me disgraced for life. Oh, why did she not live till this was past? She would have been sorry for me; she would not have blamed me so – but then, she did not know all about the money. To think, as Lettice says, that all my education, everything, has in reality been paid for by the man we can’t – or won’t – be even commonly civil to! It is the most miserable complication. Not that it matters now to me. He wouldn’t be so ready to treat me as his son now that I’ve turned out such a fool, and worse than a fool. Lots of fools get on well enough, and nobody finds out they are fools; but I must needs go and make an exhibition of myself and my folly;” and he positively writhed at the remembrance. “However, that part of it is at an end. I’ll use no more of his money, and, if I live to make any of my own, the first thing I’ll do will be to repay what I have used, though without the least idea of all this.”

Then his thoughts wandered off again to the happy family he had just left. How kind they had been to him! How gladly, had they had the slightest notion of who he was, would they have made him welcome to pass his Christmas among them! Mrs Winthrop especially, whom, as his aunt’s sister, he thought of with a peculiar interest. How gentle and motherly she was, and, doubtless, his aunt was just the same.

“Ah!” sighed Arthur again, “if Lettice could but have seen things differently, I would not have been where I am to-day. I might have given up the attempt in time, before I had disgraced myself. I might – ”

But his further reflections were cut short by a voice beside him. It came from a burly personage who had, without Arthur’s noticing, so absorbed had he been in his reflections, installed himself on the bench at his side, puffing away busily and contentedly at a clay pipe. He had not hitherto spoken, but had sat still, looking about him with a pair of shrewd but not unkindly eyes.

“And whur,” – with a broad accent – “may you be boun’, young man?” he inquired good-naturedly. “Better bide at home, say I, by such weather, if so be as one’s not forced to be on the roads.”

Chapter Eight.

A Friend in Need

“I’m sure it’s winter fairly.”

Burns.

Arthur started. He brushed hastily away the tears that lingered in his eyes, hoping that the new-comer had not observed them.

“I – I – ” he began, then hesitated a little, “I’m on my way to Liverpool. I want to go to America.”

“Ameriky,” said the old man; “that’s a long way. Have ye friends there?”

Arthur shook his head. He did not care about this cross-questioning, and, had he reflected a little, he would not perhaps have answered so openly. But he was inexperienced, and unaccustomed to be on his guard. He tried to think of some observation to make which would turn the conversation, but nothing came into his head except the subject which never fails – the weather.

“Do you think it is going to snow again?” he said timidly, glancing up at his companion. He looked something like a farmer of the humbler class – farmers were always interested in the weather.

The man raised his head quickly, as if to look up, forgetting seemingly that he was not in the open air. Then he smiled a little.

“Can’t say,” he replied. “But I rather think we’ve had the worst of it for a while. And so ye’re off to Ameriky, young man? You don’t look so fit for it nayther.”

“I’m going to Liverpool first,” said Arthur. “Perhaps I’ll stay there. I have – ” “an introduction there,” he was going on to say, but the words stopped on his lips. They sounded far too important under the circumstances. Besides, and for the first time this new difficulty struck him, he dare not avail himself of Mr Winthrop’s letter, which he had been so glad of! The person to whom it was addressed was pretty sure to be in some way connected, directly or indirectly, with his uncle’s business, and, even if not so, when Mr Winthrop came to hear of his, Arthur’s, disappearance, he might identify him with the traveller they had so kindly received, and trace him through this very introduction. And as all this went through his mind, his face fell. His companion, who was watching him, saw the change of expression.

“You have, you were saying, you have friends at Liverpool?” he said.

Arthur began to feel irritated at his pertinacity; he had not had much experience of the curiosity of many whose quiet uneventful lives force them into gossip as their only attainable excitement; but, looking up at the good-humoured face beside him, his annoyance disappeared, and in its place came a sudden impulse of confidence.

“No,” he said bluntly; “I have no friends there, nor indeed anywhere, whom I can ask for help. I have neither father nor mother. I want to earn my living, and in time, if I can, to do more than that. And I’m not proud. I’d do anything, and I’d be more grateful than I can say to any one who’d put me in the way of something.”

The farmer sat silent. He puffed away at his pipe, and between the puffs he took a good look now and again at his companion. The rather thin young face was flushed now; the beautiful brown eyes sparkled with excitement. It was a very attractive face.

“Very genteel-looking; no doubt of that. And James and Eliza think a deal o’ that,” he murmured to himself.

But Arthur did not catch the words. He sat without speaking. He had no idea of help coming from his present companion; he had no notion of what was passing in his mind. His thoughts were wandering far away, and he started when the farmer, with a preliminary cough to attract his attention, again spoke to him.

“You’re set on Liverpool, I’m thinking?” he began.

Arthur did not at once understand his meaning.

“I’m going to Liverpool. I intend to go there,” he said.

“And you’re set on it?” the farmer repeated. “No other place’d be to your fancy, I suppose?”

“Oh,” said Arthur, taking in his meaning.

“No; I don’t particularly care about Liverpool. Indeed, I rather think I should like anywhere else better.” For he realised that through the information which might not improbably be got sooner or later from Mr Winthrop, Liverpool would be the first place in which he would be sought.

“Indeed,” said the farmer.

“I had no reason for choosing Liverpool,” Arthur went on. “It was on the way to America; I suppose that was why I thought of it,” he added innocently.

“Just so,” ejaculated his companion. Then, after a few more puffs at his pipe and a few more scrutinising glances at Arthur between times, he proceeded with what he had to say. He had a daughter, it appeared, married to a draper, the draper of the little town of Greenwell, not many miles off. She, or her husband, or both of them, were in search of a young man to help in the shop, and they had confided their anxieties to their father, knowing that he had a journey of some days to make, and there was no saying but what he might come across the person they were looking for.

“Eliza, she won’t have none of the lads thereabouts,” he explained. “They’re roughish-like, and Eliza she thinks a deal o’ genteelness, does Eliza. It strikes me, young man, you’d please her for that. And it’d be a good home, if you were honest and industrious.” Here he stopped and looked at his companion.

Arthur’s face was still redder than before.

“A shop-boy,” he said to himself – “a shop-boy!” But aloud he only said quietly —

“I don’t know anything whatever of the sort of work it would be. Does not your son-in-law need some one who knows something about it?” The farmer scratched his head.

“You can write a good hand, I’m thinking,” he said; “and you can soon learn how to make out the accounts. It’s not that; it’s who’s to speak for you;” and he looked up again more scrutinisingly than heretofore in Arthur’s face. It did not grow the less red on that account. “I have no one to speak for me,” he replied haughtily; “so there’s no use thinking about it. All the same,” he went on, recollecting himself, I thank you very much, very much indeed. I’m very tired, and I think I’ll go to bed and, rising, he held out his hand, with the gentle courtesy innate in him, to the farmer, who grasped it heartily in his horny palm, with a friendly “Good night.”

“I’ll see ye in the mornin’, mebbe,” he said.

“It’s not the weather, nor yet the time o’ year, for too early a start.”

“It’s something to have any one to say: ‘Good night’ to,” thought Arthur, as he mounted the narrow staircase to the stuffy little bedroom he had with some difficulty secured to himself for the night, and the tears again welled up, though he tried hard to ignore them.

He slept soundly for some hours, for he was thoroughly tired; but he woke early, and lay anxiously turning over things in his mind. Should he try for the situation the farmer had spoken of? True, there was the difficulty of “no references;” but Arthur’s practical sense had thought of a way out of that. He had some money – very little with him – but a few pounds he had left with his clothes and other small possessions in the safe keeping of a young man, whom he knew he could depend upon to keep secret. This was a former servant in the family of Arthur’s tutor; and when obliged through an accident to leave his place, some kindness young Morison had shown him had completely gained his heart.

“I could write to Dawson to send my box on to Greenwell, or whatever’s the name of the place,” he said to himself. “Then I could give the genteel Eliza some money to keep as a sort of guaranty, to be given back to me when they were satisfied I was not a thief;” and Arthur laughed, perhaps because it was better than crying. “I believe that would do away with all difficulties. And once I am settled, it would be something to be able to write to Lettice, and tell her that, disgraced as I am, I have still found something to do, and that I am earning my own livelihood already.”

His face flushed, though with honest pride this time.

“I should have preferred her to think me in America,” his thoughts went on; “but it would be wrong to leave them in anxiety so long. At least, if they still think me worth being anxious about! Any way, they will be glad to know I am alive and well.”

He had already since his flight written twice to his sisters, twice since the terrible day when, morally convinced of his failure, he had altogether lost heart and fainted in his place among the candidates, though the examination was but half over. He had written, confessing the whole – his nervous terror of the ordeal, his utter incapacity to face more, his thorough unfitness for the profession he had no wish to enter, and announcing, at the same time, his determination henceforth to depend on himself alone, and to work till he could repay the obligation to their uncle, of which Lettice, in her mistaken idea of keeping up his spirit, had so often reminded him.

“I am not a coward,” he had said in one of these letters, “though Lettice may say I am. I have only been a coward in one thing – in my fear of telling the truth, which I thought would so horribly distress her. I dreaded her reproaches, and I still dread them; but I shall no longer deserve them. I, at least, will make my own way, and some day I may be able to do something for all of you, and, in the meantime, you will all be better and happier without the brother who has disappointed you so sadly.”

And these letters he had sent through the same agency, that of poor Dawson, so that there was no post-mark or mark of any kind to betray his present quarters.

And so his thoughts went on that dreary morning in the little stuffy bedroom. If he did not accept the chance so unexpectedly thrown in his way, what was he to do? He dared not make use of his letter to Mr Winthrop’s friend; he dared hardly go to Liverpool. For he was beginning to gain experience. He saw that without references of any kind he might get into awkward predicaments, might be suspected of having run away in disgrace of some very different kind from the failure which he himself judged so severely.

“And that would be too horrible,” thought the poor boy; “to be taken up as a suspicious character, and a scandal about it, and to have to go home and go on living on Uncle Ingram’s money after all, and feel that every one connected with me was ashamed of me! No; I must see what that old fellow has to say, if he hasn’t thought better of it. He’s a good old chap, I’m sure.”

His resolution had not time to cool, for the farmer had “slept upon it” to some purpose. He greeted Arthur with friendly good nature, and, without his needing to broach the subject, started it himself again. He was on his way home, and had promised to “stop with Eliza and James over Christmas,” as Greenwell was only a few hours from his own village, and he proposed to Arthur to accompany him, “to take a look at the place like, so being as he had naught better to do with hisself.”

“And to let them take a look at me,” added Arthur, smiling. “It’s very good of you indeed. It’s more than good of you,” he added, “to trust a perfect stranger, and one that can’t tell you all about himself either. It was family troubles that have made me leave my home, but that’s all I can say.”

“There’s no lack o’ troubles nowheer,” said the farmer; “and there’s no need o’ telling what’s no one’s business but one’s own.”

“But,” continued Arthur, “if your son-in-law, Mr – I don’t think you told me his name?”

“Lamb, James Lamb,” replied the old man.

“If Mr Lamb engages me, I can give him a sort of a pledge for my honesty, any way. I have a little money I can send for, and I could give it into his keeping for a while.”

The farmer’s face cleared.

“That’s not a bad idea,” he said. “Not but what I knows an honest face when I sees one, but James – he might think me soft-like. I had a lad o’ my own onst,” he went on, with an unusual gentleness in his voice, “and I lost him many years ago now – Eliza she were the daughter o’ my wife that is – just about thy age, my lad,” relapsing into the second person singular as he grew more at ease, “seems to me he favoured thee a bit. But Eliza and James they’d mebbe laugh at me for an old fool, so I’m mighty glad about the money.”

“I won’t write for it yet,” said Arthur. “I’d better wait till we get to Greenwell, and see how things turn out I left it with my clothes and other things with a friend to send after me.”

“Just so,” said the farmer. “Oh, as for that, it’ll be time enough.”

An hour or two later saw Arthur, in company with his new friend, mounted in the light box-cart of the latter, and driving, though at a sober pace, for the roads were very slippery, in the direction of the little town of Greenwell. It was a long drive. They stopped towards midday at a little roadside inn for some refreshment in the shape of bread-and-cheese and beer, and then jogged on again. It was not a luxurious mode of travelling; still, it was much better than tramping through the snow, and Arthur’s days of roughing it had taught him the useful lesson of being thankful for small boons. But as the early winter dusk fell it grew colder and colder, and Arthur shivered, though he had a good thick coat, and the farmer had given him a plentiful share of the rough horse-cloth, which did duty for a carriage rug.

“Christmas Eve,” he said, after a long silence, hardly aware that he was speaking aloud.

“Ay so,” said his companion, “the years they comes, and the years they goes. ’Tis many a Christmas Eve and Christmas Day as I mind. ‘Peace on earth, goodwill to men,’ parson tells us. They’ve been a-tellin’ it a sight o’ Christmases, seems to me, but we’re a long way off it still, I’m afeard.”

“I’m afraid so,” said Arthur with a sigh.

And then his thoughts wandered off again to his home. Lettice would hear those same words to-morrow morning. How would they strike her? Was she not wrong, quite wrong? was the question that came over and over again for the thousandth time in his mind. Could it be showing true honour to their dead parents to persist in the course she was doing – a course setting at defiance the Divine injunction? Nay, even allowing they, or their father rather, had been injured, unfairly treated, was there not Divine command for such cases, too? “Forgive, as ye would be forgiven,” “unto seventy times seven,” were the words that floated about before the boy’s eyes, illuminated, as it were, on the ever-darkening sky in front of him. And who was it they were refusing to forgive? One who had never injured them, one who had generously taken upon him responsibilities and risks he was in no way called upon to trouble himself with.

“Ah, yes,” thought Arthur sadly, “that has been his crime in her eyes – his very goodness.” And somehow he felt less unhappy and perplexed when he allowed himself to recognise this than when he strove, as he had thought himself bound to do, against his better judgment, to think Lettice right, to accept the arguments she had so plausibly brought to bear upon him.

“She must be wrong,” he thought. “And if I had been older and wiser, or, at least, more courageous, I might have made her care to see it. But what right have I to speak, miserable failure that I am? I can only do what I am doing – be faithful and loyal to her, even if she is mistaken, and do my utmost to lessen the burden;” and, with another sigh, Arthur shook himself out of his reverie.