That Boy Of Norcott's

I sat down at once and began: —

“Dear papa,” – he would never permit me to use a more endearing word. “Dear papa, I hope you will forgive me troubling you about myself and my future. I would like to fit myself for some career or calling by which I might become independent. I could work very hard and study very closely if I were back with my mother.”

As I reached this far, the door opened, and Eccles appeared.

“All right!” cried he; “I was afraid I should catch you in bed still, and I ‘m glad you ‘re up and preparing for the road. Are you nearly ready?”

“Not quite; I wanted to write a letter before I go. I was just at it.”

“Write from Verviers or Bonn; you’ll have lots of time on the road.”

“Ay, but my letter might save me from the journey if I sent it off now.”

He looked amazed at this, and I at once told him my plan and showed him what I had written.

“You don’t mean to say you ‘d have courage to send this to your father?”

“And why not?”

“Well, all I have to say is, don’t do it till I ‘m off the premises; for I ‘d not be here when he reads it for a trifle. My dear Digby,” said he, with a changed tone, “you don’t know Sir Roger; you don’t know the violence of his temper if he imagines himself what he calls outraged, which sometimes means questioned. Take your hat and stick, and go seek your fortune, in Heaven’s name, if you must; but don’t set out on your life’s journey with a curse or a kick, or possibly both. If I preach patience, my dear boy, I have had to practise it too. Put up your traps in your portmanteau; come down and take some dinner: we ‘ll start with the night-train; and take my word for it, we ‘ll have a jolly ramble and enjoy ourselves heartily. If I know anything of life, it is that there’s no such mistake in the world as hunting up annoyances. Let them find us if they can, but let us never run after them.”

“My heart is too heavy for such enjoyment as you talk of.”

“It won’t be so to-morrow, or, at all events, the day after. Come, stir yourself now with your packing; a thought has just struck me that you ‘ll be very grateful to me for, when I tell it you.”

“What is it?” asked I, half carelessly.

“You must ask with another guess-look in your eye if you expect me to tell you.”

“You could tell me nothing that would gladden me.”

“Nor propose anything that you’d like?” asked he.

“Nor that, either,” said I, despondingly.

“Oh, if that be the case, I give up my project; not that it was much of a project, after all. What I was going to suggest was that instead of dining here we should put our traps into a cab, and drive down to Delorme’s and have a pleasant little dinner there, in the garden; it’s quite close to the railroad, so that we could start at the last whistle.”

“That does sound pleasantly,” said I; “there’s nothing more irksome in its way than hanging about a station waiting for departure.”

“So, then, you agree?” cried he, with a malicious twinkle in his eye that I affected not to understand.

“Yes,” said I, indolently; “I see little against it; and if nothing else, it saves me a leave-taking with Captain Hotham and Cleremont.”

“By the way, you are not to ask to see Madame; your father reminded me to tell you this. The doctors say she is not to be disturbed on any account. What a chance that I did not forget this!”

Whether it was that I was too much concerned for my own misfortunes to have a thought that was not selfish, or that another leave-taking that loomed in the distance was uppermost in my thoughts, certain it is, I felt this privation far less acutely than I might.

“She’s a nice little woman, and deserves a better lot than she has met with.”

“What sort of dinner will Delorme give us?” said I, affecting the air of a man about town, but in reality throwing out the bait to lead the talk in that direction.

“First-rate, if we let him; that is, if we only say, ‘Order dinner for us, Monsieur Pierre.’ There’s no man understands such a mandate more thoroughly.”

“Then that’s what I shall say,” cried I, “as I cross his threshold.”

“He’ll serve you Madeira with your soup, and Stein-berger with your fish, thirty francs a bottle, each of them.”

“Be it so. We shall drink to our pleasant journey,” said I; and I actually thought my voice had caught the tone and cadence of my father’s as I spoke.

CHAPTER XIV. A GOOD-BYE

While I strolled into the garden to select a table for our dinner, Eccles went in search of Mr. Delorme; and though he had affected to say that the important duty of devising the feast should be confided to the host, I could plainly see that my respected tutor accepted his share in that high responsibility.

I will only say of the feast in question, that, though I was daily accustomed to the admirable dinners of my father’s table, I had no conception of what exquisite devices in cookery could be produced by the skill of an accomplished restaurateur, left free to his own fancy, and without limitation as to the bill.

One thing alone detracted from the perfect enjoyment of the banquet It was the appearance of Mr. Delorme himself, white-cravated and gloved, carrying in the soup. It was an attention that he usually reserved for great personages, royalties, or high dignitaries of the court; and I was shocked that he should have selected me for the honor, not the less as it was only a few hours before he and I had been drinking champagne with much clinking of glasses together, and interchanging the most affectionate vows of eternal friendship.

I arose from my chair to salute him; but, as he deposited the tureen upon the table, he stepped back and bowed low, and retreated in this fashion, with the same humble reverence at every step, till he was lost in the distance.

“Sit down,” said Eccles, with a peculiar look, as though to warn me that I was forgetting my dignity; and then, to divert my attention, he added, “That green seal is an attention Delorme offers you, – a very rare favor, too, – a bottle of his own peculiar Johannisberg. Let us drink his health. Now, Digby, I call this something very nigh perfection.”

It was a theme my tutor understood thoroughly, and there was not a dish nor a wine that he did not criticise.

“I was always begging your father to take this cook, Digby,” said he, with half sigh. “Even with a first-rate artist you need change, otherwise your dinners become manneristic, as ours have become of late.”

He then went on to show me that the domestic cook, always appealing to the small public of the family, gets narrowed in his views and bounded in his resources. He compared them, I remember, to the writers in certain religious newspapers, who must always go on spicing higher and higher as the palates of their clients grow more jaded. How he worked out his theme afterwards I cannot tell, for I was watching the windows of the house, and stealing glances down the alleys in the garden, longing for one look, ever so fleeting, of my lovely partner of the night before.

“I see, young gentleman,” said he, evidently nettled at my inattention, “your thoughts are not with me.”

“How long have we to stay, sir?” said I, reverting to the respect I tendered him at my lessons.

“You have thirty-eight minutes,” said he, examining his watch: “which I purpose to apportion in this wise, – eight for the douceur, five for the cheese, fifteen for the dessert, five for coffee and a glass of curaçoa. The bill and our parting compliments will take the rest, giving us three minutes to walk across to the station.”

These sort of pedantries were a passion with him, and I did not interpose a word as he spoke.

“What a pineapple!” cried a young fellow from an adjoining table, as a waiter deposited a magnificent pine in the midst of the bouquet that adorned our table.

“Monsieur Delorme begs to say, sir, this has just arrived from Laeken.”

“Don’t you know who that is?” said a companion, in a low voice; but my hearing, ever acute, caught the words, “He’s that boy of Norcott’s.” I started as if I had received a blow. It was time to resent these insolences, and make an end of them forever.

“You heard what that man yonder has called me?” said I to Eccles.

“No; I was not minding him.”

“The old impertinence, – ‘That boy of Norcott’s.’”

I arose, and took the cane I had laid against a chair. What I was about to do I knew not. I felt I should launch some insolent provocation. As for what should follow, the event might decide that.

“I’d not mind him, Digby,” said Eccles, carelessly, as he lit his cigarette, and stretched his legs on a vacant chair. I took no notice of his words, but walked on. Before, however, I had made three steps my eyes caught the flutter of a dress at the end of the alley. It was merely the last folds of some floating muslin, but it was enough to rout all other thoughts from my head, and I flew down the walk with lightning speed. I was right; it was Pauline. In an instant I was beside her.

“Dearest, darling Pauline,” I cried, seizing her round the waist and kissing her cheek, before she well knew, “how happy it makes me to see you even for a few seconds.”

“Ah, milord, I did not expect to see you here,” said she, half distantly.

“I am not milord; I am your own Digby – Digby Nor-cott, who loves you, and will make you his wife.”

“Ma foi! children don’t marry, – at least demoiselles don’t marry them,” said she, with a saucy laugh.

“I am no more an ‘enfant,’” said I, with a passionate stress on the word, “than I was last night, when you never left my arm except to sit at my side at supper.”

“But you are going away,” said she, pouting; “else why that travelling-dress, and that sack strapped at your side?”

“Only for a few weeks. A short tour up the Rhine, Pauline, to see the world, and complete my education; and then I will come back and marry you, and you shall be mistress of a beautiful house, and have everything you can think of.”

“Vrai?” asked she, with a little laugh.

“I swear it by this kiss.”

“Pardie, Monsieur? you are very adventurous,” said she, repulsing me; “you will make me not regret that you are going so soon.”

“Oh, Pauline! when you know that I adore you, that I only value wealth to share it with you; that all I ask of life is to devote it to you.”

“And that you have n’t got full thirty seconds left for that admirable object,” broke in Eccles. “We must run for it like fury, boy, or we shall be late.”

“I’ll not go.”

“Then I ‘ll be shot if I stay here and meet your father,” said he, turning away.

“Oh, Pauline, dearest, dearest of my heart!” I sobbed out, as I fell upon her neck; and the vile bell of the railway rang out with its infernal discord as I clasped her to my heart.

“Come along, and confound you,” cried Eccles; and with a porter on one side and Eccles on the other, I was hurried along down the garden, across a road, and along a platform, where the station-master, wild with passion, stamped and swore in a very different mood from that in which he smiled at me across the supper-table the night before.

“We’re waiting for that boy of Norcott’s, I vow,” said an old fellow with a gray moustache; and I marked him out for future recognition.

Unlike my first journey, where all seemed confusion, trouble, and annoyance, I now saw only pleasant faces, and people bent on enjoyment. We were on the great tourist road of Europe, and it seemed as though every one was bound on some errand of amusement. Eccles, too, was a pleasant contrast to the courier who took charge of me on my first journey. Nothing could be more genial than his manner. He treated me with a perfect equality, and by that greatest of all flatteries to one of my age, induced me to believe that I was actually companionable to himself.

I will not pretend that he was an instructive companion.

He had neither knowledge of history nor feeling for art, and rather amused himself with sneering at both, and quizzing such of our fellow-travellers as the practice was safe with. But he was always gay, always in excellent spirits, ready to make light of the passing annoyances of the road, and, as he said himself, he always carried a quart-bottle of condensed sunshine with him against a rainy day; and, of my own knowledge, I can say his supply seemed inexhaustible.

His cheery manner, his bright good looks, and his invariable good-humor won upon every one, and the sourest and least genial people thawed into some show of warmth under his contagious pleasantry.

He did not care in what direction we went, and would have left it entirely to me to decide, had I been able to determine. All he stipulated for was: “No barbarism, no Oberland or glacier humbug. No Saxon Switzerland abominations. So long as we travel in a crowd, and meet good cookery every day, you ‘ll find me charming.”

Into this philosophy he inducted me. “Make life pleasant, Digby; never go in search of annoyances. Duns and disagreeables will come of themselves, and it’s no bad fun dodging them. It’s only a fool ever keeps their company.”

A more shameless immorality might have revolted me, but this peddling sort of wickedness, this half-jesting with right and wrong, – giving to morals the aspect of a game in which a certain kind of address was practicable, – was very seductive to one of my age and temper. I fancied, too, that I was becoming a consummate man of the world, and his praises of my proficiency were unsparingly bestowed.

Attaching ourselves to this or that party of travellers, we would go off here or there, in any direction, for four or five days; and though I usually found myself growing fond of those I became more intimate with, and sorry to part from them, Eccles invariably wearied of the pleasant-est people after a day or two. Incessant change seemed essential to him, and his nature and his spirits flagged when denied it.

What I least liked about him, however, was a habit he had of “trotting” me out – his own name for it – before strangers. My knowledge of languages, my skill at games, my little musical talents, he would parade in a way that I found positively offensive. Nor was this all, for I found he represented me as the son of a man of immense wealth and of a rank commensurate with his fortune.

One must have gone through the ordeal of such a representation to understand its vexations, to know all the impertinences it can evoke from some, all the slavish attentions from others. I feel a hot flush of shame on my cheek now, after long years, as I think of the mortifications I went through, as Eccles would suggest that I should buy some princely chateau that we saw in passing, or some lordly park alongside of which our road was lying.

As to remonstrating with him on this score, or, indeed, on any other, it was utterly hopeless; not to say that it was just as likely he would amuse the first group of travellers we met by a ludicrous version of my attempt to coerce him into good behavior.

One day he pushed my patience beyond all limit, and I grew downright angry with him. I had been indulging in that harmless sort of half-flirtation with a young lady, a fellow-traveller; which, not transgressing the bounds of small attentions, does not even excite remark or rebuke.

“Don’t listen to that young gentleman’s blandishments,” said he, laughing; “for, young as he looks, he is already engaged. Come, come, don’t look as though you’d strike me, Digby, but deny it if you can.”

We were, fortunately for me, coming into a station as he spoke. I sprang out, and travelled third-class the rest of the day to avoid him, and when we met at night, I declared that with one such liberty more I ‘d part company with him forever.

The hearty good-humor with which he assured me I should not be offended again almost made me ashamed of my complaint. We shook hands over our reconciliation, and vowed we were better friends than ever.

What it cost him to abandon this habit of exalting me before strangers, how nearly it touched one of the chief pleasures of his life, I was, as I thought, soon to see in the altered tone of his manner. In fact, it totally destroyed the easy flippancy he used to wield, and a facility with strangers that once seemed like a special gift with him. I tried in vain to rally him out of this half depression; but it was clear he was not a man of many resources, and that I had already sapped a principal one.

While we thus journeyed, he said to me one day, “I find, Digby, our money is running short; we must make for Zurich: it is the nearest of the places on our letter of credit.”

I assented, of course, and we bade adieu to a pleasant family with whom we had been travelling, and who were bound for Dresden, assuring them we should meet them on the Elbe.

Eccles had grown of late more and more serious: not alone had his gayety deserted him, but he grew absent and forgetful to an absurd extent; and it was evident some great preoccupation had hold of him. During the entire of the last day before we reached Zurich he scarcely spoke a word, and as I saw that he had received some letters at Schaffhausen, I attributed his gloom to their tidings. As he had not spoken to me of bad news, I felt ashamed to obtrude myself on his confidence and kept silent, and not a word passed between us as we went. He had telegraphed to the banker, a certain Mr. Heinfetter, to order rooms for us at the hotel; and as we alighted at the door, the gentleman himself was there to meet us.

“Herr Eccles?” said he, eagerly, lifting his hat as we descended; and Eccles moved towards him, and, taking his arm, walked away to some distance, leaving me alone and unnoticed. For several minutes they appeared in closest confab, their heads bent close together, and at last I saw Eccles shake himself free from the other’s arm, and throw up both his hands in the air with a gesture of wild despair. I began to suspect some disaster had befallen our remittances, that they were lost or suppressed, and that Eccles was overwhelmed by the misfortune. I own I could not participate in the full measure of the misery it seemed to cause him, and I lighted a cigar and sat down on a stone bench to wait patiently his return.

“I believe you are right; it is the best way, after all,” said Ecoles, hurriedly. “You say you’ll look after the boy, and I ‘ll start by the ten o’clock train.”

“Yes, I’ll take the boy,” said the other; “but you’ll have to look sharp and lose no time. They will be sequestering the moment they hear of it, and I half suspect old Engler will be before you.”

“But my personal effects? I have things of value.”

“Hush, hush! he ‘ll overhear you. Come, young gentleman,” said he to me, – “come home and sup with me. The hotel is so full, they ‘ve no quarters for you. I ‘ll try if I can’t put you up.”

Eccles stood with his head bent down as we moved away, then lifted his eyes, waved his hand a couple of times, and said, “By-bye.”

“Isn’t he coming with us?” asked I.

“Not just yet: he has some business to detain him,” said the banker; and we moved on.

CHAPTER XV. A TERRIBLE SHOCK

Herb Heinfetter was a bachelor, and lived in a very modest fashion over his banking-house; and as he was employed from morning to night, I saw next to nothing of him. Eccles, he said, had been called away, and though I eagerly asked where, by whom, and for how long, I got no other answer than “He is called away,” in very German English, and with a stolidity of look fully as Teutonic.

The banker was not talkative: he smoked all the evening, and drank beer, and except an occasional monosyllabic comment on its excellence, said little.

“Ach, ja!” he would say, looking at me fixedly, as though assenting to some not exactly satisfactory conclusion his mind had come to about me, – “ach, ja!” And I would have given a good deal at the time to know to what peculiar feature of my fortune or my fate this half-compassionate exclamation extended.

“Is Eccles never coming back?” cried I, one day, as the post came in, and no tidings of him appeared; “is he never coming at all?”

“Never, no more.”

“Not coming back?” cried I.

“No; not come back no more.”

“Then what am I staying here for? Why do I wait for him?”

“Because you have no money to go elsewhere,” said he; and for once he gave way to something he thought was a laugh.

“I don’t understand you, Herr Heinfetter,” said I; “our letter of credit, Mr. Eccles told me, was on your house here. Is it exhausted, and must I wait for a remittance?”

“It is exhaust; Mr. Eccles exhaust it.”

“So that I must write for money; is that so?”

“You may write and write, mien lieber, but it won’t come.”

Herr Heinfetter drained his tall glass, and, leaning his arms on the table, said: “I will tell you in German, you know it well enough.” And forthwith he began a story, which lost nothing of the pain and misery it caused me by the unsympathizing tone and stolid look of the narrator. For my reader’s sake, as for my own, I will condense it into the fewest words I can, and omit all that Herr Heinfetter inserted either as comment or censure. My father had eloped with Madame Cleremont! They had fled to Inn-spruck, from which my father returned to the neighborhood of Belgium, to offer Cleremont a meeting. Cleremont, however, possessed in his hands a reparation he liked better, – my father’s check-book, with a number of signed but unfilled checks. These he at once filled up to the last shilling of his credit, and drew out the money, so that my father’s first draft on London was returned dishonored. The villa and all its splendid contents were sequestrated, and an action for divorce, with ten thousand pounds laid as damages, already commenced. Of three thousand francs, which our letter assured us at Zurich, Eccles had drawn two thousand: he would have taken all, but Heinfetter, who prudently foresaw I must be got rid of some day, retained one thousand to pay my way. Eccles had gone, promising to return when he had saved his own effects, or what he called his own, from the wreck; but a few lines had come from him to say the smash was complete, the “huissiers” in possession, seals on everything, and “not even the horses watered without a gendarme present in full uniform.”

“Tell Digby, if we travel together again, he ‘ll not have to complain of my puffing him off for a man of fortune; and, above all, advise him to avoid Brussels in his journey-ings. He ‘ll find his father’s creditors, I ‘m afraid, far more attached to him than Mademoiselle Pauline.”

His letter wound up with a complaint over his own blighted prospects, for, of course, his chance of the presentation was now next to hopeless, and he did not know what line of life he might be driven to.

And now, shall I own that, ruined and deserted as I was, overwhelmed with sorrow and shame, there was no part of all the misery I felt more bitterly than the fate of her who had been so kindly affectionate to me, – who had nursed me so tenderly in sickness, and been the charming companion of my happiest hours? At first it seemed incredible. My father’s manner to her had ever been coldness itself, and I could only lead myself to believe the story by imagining how the continued cruelty of Cleremont had actually driven the unhappy woman to entreat protection against his barbarity. It was as well I should think so, and it served to soften the grief and assuage the intensity of the sorrow the event caused me. I cried over it two entire days and part of a third; and so engrossed was I with this affliction that not a thought of myself, or of my own destitution, ever crossed me.

“Do you know where my father is?” asked I of the banker.

“Yes,” said he, dryly.

“May I have his address? I wish to write to him.”

“This is what he send for message,” said he, producing a telegram, the address of which he had carefully torn off. “It is of you he speak: ‘Do what you like with him except bother me. Let him have whatever money is in your hands to my credit, and let him understand he has no more to expect from Roger Norcott.’”

“May I keep this paper, sir?” asked I, in a humble tone.

“I see no reason against it. Yes,” muttered he. “As to the moneys, Eccles have drawn eighty pound; there is forty remain to you.”

I sat down and covered my face with my hands. It was a habit with me when I wanted to apply myself fully to thought; but Herr Heinfetter suspected that I had given way to grief, and began to cheer me up. I at once undeceived him, and said, “No, I was not crying, sir; I was only thinking what I had best do. If you allow me, I will go up to my room, and think it over by myself. I shall be calmer, even if I hit on nothing profitable.”