CHAPTER IV
THE NEW HOME

Harry had hoped that his companion would go his own way when they got to London; but it was "his funeral," as Mr. Lowndes kept saying, and he seemed determined to conduct it to the end. Euston was crowded, where Lowndes behaved like a man in his element, dealing abuse and largesse with equal energy and freedom, and getting Harry and all his boxes off in the first cab which left the station. But he himself was at Harry's side; and there he sat until the cab stopped, half-an-hour later, beneath a many-windowed red-brick pile thrown up in the angle of two back streets.

A porter in uniform ran up to help with the luggage, and, as Harry jumped out, a voice with a glad sob in it hailed him from a first-floor window. He waved his hat, and, with a pang, saw a white head vanishing: it had not been white when he went away. Next moment he was flying up the stone stairs three at a time; and on the first landing, at an open door, there was the sweet face, all aged and lined and lighted with sorrow and shame and love; there were the softest arms in all the world, spread wide to catch and clasp him to the warmest heart.

It was a long time afterwards, in a room which made the old furniture look very big, the old pictures very sad, that Mr. Lowndes was remembered for the first time. They looked into the narrow passage: the boxes blocked it, but he was not there; they called, but there was no answer.

"Have we no servant, mother?"

"We have no room for one. The porter's wife comes up and helps me."

"I can help you! Many a meal have I cooked in Africa."

"My boy, what a home-coming!"

It was the first word about that, and with it came the first catch in Harry's mother's voice.

"No, mother, thank God I am back to take care of you; and oh! I am so thankful we are to be alone to-night."

"But I am sorry he did not come in."

"He was quite right not to."

"But he must have paid for the cab – I will look out of the window – yes, it has gone – and I had the money ready in case you forgot!"

Harry could have beaten himself, but he could not tell his mother just then that he had arrived without a penny, and that Lowndes had not only paid the cabman, but must be pounds out of pocket by him on the day.

"Don't you like him, dear?" said his mother, divining that he did not.

"I do and I don't," said Harry bluntly.

"He has been so kind to me!"

"Yes; he is kind enough."

"Did you not think it good of him to rush from Scotland to meet you and then bring you all the way to your – new – home?"

"It was almost too good. I would have been happier alone," said Harry, forgetting all else in his bitter remembrance of some speeches Lowndes had made.

"That is not very grateful, my boy. You little know what he has been to me!"

"Has he done so much?"

"Everything – all through! You see what I have saved from the wreck? It was he who went to bid for me at the sale!"

"You bought them in, mother?"

"Yes; I could accept nothing from the creditors. That is the one point on which I quarrel with Mr. Lowndes; but we have agreed to differ. Why do you dislike him, Harry?"

"Mother, don't you know?"

"I cannot imagine."

"He thinks the worst – about my father."

It was the first mention of the father's name. Mrs. Ringrose was silent for many moments.

"I know he does," she said at length.

"Then how can you bear the sight of him?" her boy burst out.

"It is no worse than all the world thinks."

And Mrs. Ringrose sighed; but now her voice was abnormally calm, as with a grief too great for tears.

The long May evening had not yet closed in, and in the ensuing silence the cries of children in the street below, and the Last Waltz of Weber from the piano of the flat above, came with equal impertinence through the open windows. Mrs. Ringrose was in the rocking-chair in which she had nursed her only child. Her back was to the light, but she was rocking slowly. Her son stood over her with horror deepening in his face, but hers he could not see, only the white head which two years ago had been hardly grey. He dropped upon his knees and seized her hands; they were cold; and he missed her rings.

"Mother – mother! You don't think it too?"

No answer.

"You do! Oh, mother, how are we to go on living after this? What makes you think it? Quick! has he written to you?"

Mrs. Ringrose started violently. "Who put that into your head?" she cried out sharply.

"Nobody. I only wondered if there had been a letter, and I asked Lowndes, but he said you said there had not."

"Was that not enough for you?"

"Oh, mother, tell me the truth!"

The poor lady groaned aloud.

"God knows I meant to keep it to myself!" she whispered. "And yet – oh, how could I destroy his letter? And I thought you ought to see it – some day – not yet."

"Mother, I must see it now."

"You will never breathe it to a soul?"

"Never without your permission."

"No one must ever dream I heard one word after he left me!"

"No one ever shall."

"I will get the letter."

His hand was trembling when he took it from her.

"It was written on the steamer, you see."

"It may be a forgery," said Harry, in a loud voice that trembled too. Yet there was a ring of real hope in it. He was thinking of Lowndes in the train. He had caught him mopping a wet brow. He had surprised a guilty look – yes, guilty was the word – he had found it at last – in those shifty eyes behind the pince-nez. If villainy should be at the bottom of it all, and Lowndes at the bottom of the villainy!

If the letter should prove a forgery after all!

He had it in his hand. He carried it to the failing light. He hardly dared to look at it, but when he did a cry escaped him.

It was a cry of disappointment and abandoned hope.

Minutes passed without another sound; then the letter was slowly folded up and restored to its envelope, and dropped into Harry's pocket, before his arms went round his mother's neck.

"Mother, let me burn it, so that no eyes but ours shall ever see!"

"Burn it? Burn the last letter I may ever have from him? Give it to me!" And she pressed it to her bosom.

Harry hung his head in a long and wretched silence.

"We must forget him, mother," he said at last.

"Harry, he was a good father to you, he loved you dearly. He was mad when he did what he has done. You must never say that again."

"I meant we must forget what he has done – "

"Ah God! if I could!"

"And only think of him as he used to be."

"Yes; yes; we will try."

"It would be easier – don't you think – if we never spoke of this?"

"We never will, unless we must."

"Let us think that we just failed like other people. But, mother, I will work all my life to pay off everybody! I will work for you till I drop. Goodness knows what at; but I learnt to work for fun in Africa, I am ready to work in earnest, and, thank God, I have all my life before me."

"You are twenty-one to-day!"

"Yes, I start fair in every way."

"That this should be your twenty-first birthday! My boy – my boy!"

The long May twilight deepens into night; the many windows of the red-brick block are lit up one by one; and the many lives go on. Below, at the curb, a doctor's brougham and a hansom are waiting end to end; and from that top flat a young couple come scuttling down the stone stairs, he in a crush-hat, she with a flower in her hair, and theirs is the hansom. The flat below has similar tenants, but here the doctor is, and the young man paces his desolate parlour with a ghastly face.

And in the flat below that it is Weber's Last Waltz once more, and nothing else, by the hour together. And in the flat below that – the flat that would have gone into one room of their old home – Harry Ringrose and his mother are still steeling themselves and one another to face the future and to live down the past.

The light has been lowered in their front room and transferred for a space to the tiny dining-room at the back, which looks down into the building's well, but now it is the front windows which stand out once more. Twelve o'clock comes, and there is a tinkle of homing hansoms (the brougham has gone away masterless), and the public-house at the corner empties noisily, but the light in those front windows remains the brightest in the mansions. And Weber is done with at last; but the two voices below go on and on and on into the night; nor do they cease when their light shifts yet again into the front bedroom.

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!"