THE SON OF HIS FATHER.
VOL. III.

THE SON OF HIS FATHER

BY
MRS. OLIPHANT
AUTHOR OF
“IT WAS A LOVER AND HIS LASS,” “AGNES,”
“THE LAIRD OF NORLAW,”
ETC., ETC.
IN THREE VOLUMES.
VOL. III.
LONDON:
HURST AND BLACKETT, LIMITED,
13, GREAT MARLBOROUGH STREET.
1887.
All rights reserved.

CONTENTS
OF
THE THIRD VOLUME.

THE SON OF HIS FATHER.

CHAPTER I.
THE GREAT SCHEME.

John’s imagination, though it was so full of other matters, was affected more than he could understand by his strange visitor. He felt himself going back a hundred times in the course of the evening to this man, and those curious sophistries which he produced, always with that half smile in his eyes, as if he himself saw the absurdity in them, and as if morals and reason were something outside of himself to be treated with entire impartiality.

John wondered how far he believed or disbelieved what he had been saying, and whether these dispassionate discussions of what was formally right or wrong took away from a conscience, which could not be very delicate or sensitive, anything of the burden. They set him thinking too, following the career of such a being, trying to understand. Drink—was not in the decalogue, as his visitor had said: and John had seen enough even in his short life to know with what facility, with what innocence of evil meaning, the first step may be taken in that most general, most destructive of all vices—the one which leads to so many other developments, and which involves, as that philosopher had allowed, consequences more terrible, and penalties more prompt and inevitable than any other. John was very strenuous against it, almost bitter, having seen, as everyone has seen, its disastrous effects upon both body and soul. And yet, perhaps it was true what the other had said. Perhaps there were sins which brought no immediate evil consequences, which yet were blacker in the sight of heaven.

He felt himself wondering, with an indulgent feeling which was strange to him, how it was that a man who had nothing in him of the criminal air, a man full of thoughtfulness and humorous observation, and a knowledge of the workings of the mind, should have fallen into crime, and should have sunk into those depths and abysses of misery where he had no friend but Joe. A man must have reduced all the motives of human life to their elements, he must have banished all consideration of the outward and visible, all thoughts of the alleviations, the consolations, the comforts and stays of existence before he could have sunk contentedly to the bottom, and cynically, stoically, smilingly, despairingly, made himself believe that his brutal ‘mate’ was as good as any other, being all that remained to him.

And what, John asked himself, could remain for a convict whose world for so many years had been limited to the interior of a prison, and who in the course of working out his sentence had lost everything? What remained? One would suppose the poor wretch’s family, somebody who belonged to him, some wife or sister, or daughter. And then came his story: It is Corban—a gift. John felt his own heart bleed at the mere thought of this hopeless, succourless, yet uncomplaining misery. A man who could manage still to smile in the face of all that, to maintain still the attitude of a thinker, of an observer looking on at his own entire destitution with impartial eyes, with that calm and full understanding and humorous despair—the young man shuddered in the midst of his own success and prosperity, and love and hope. Could there be a more complete and absolute contrast? It was so great that his heart seemed to stand still as he contemplated it—a distance as of heaven from hell.

The evening was spent in very close work; for he found that a great many details had to be filled in and made clear before the plan, worked out in his own brain, could be made presentable to the experienced and critical eyes to which he meant to submit it. And he was at his writing-table again early in the morning, arranging his papers so as to make the copying easy, with much question in his own mind whether his new protegé would really come, whether he would prove capable of such work. John thought that in all likelihood the man would not come, and was giving up with a regret which seemed even to himself quite uncalled for—regret as for a pet project which he gave up most unwillingly—the plan of active charity which he had so hastily adopted—when his visitor of the previous day suddenly appeared. He came alone, trim and well-brushed, but with a shaking hand, and eyes which were red and muddy, and made his excuses with a deprecating smile.

‘I’m late,’ he said, ‘you must make allowance for bad habits. And I’ve had to get up as other people pleased for so long that I can’t help indulging a little now; but I work quickly and I’ll soon make it up.’

‘There is no hurry,’ said John: which was not exactly true, nor what he would have said to anyone else. And they worked together for the greater part of the day, not talking much, though John’s secretary now and then paused, leaned back upon his chair, raised his eyes to the ceiling, and seemed on the eve of resuming the philosophisings of last night. But John was too busy to take any notice, and his companion presently would fall to work again.

He had no special knowledge of John’s subject, but he had a great deal of intelligence, and asked reasonable questions and led John into explanations which were very useful to him, showing him how to recommend and elucidate his plan. They had their chop together in the middle of the day, and John found his companion more and more agreeable. There was something natural, familiar, in the relations into which they fell. John was a young man not too easy, as his fellow-workers knew, to ‘get on with.’ He was very exacting in the matter of attention to work. He was apt to conceive a contempt for the people who did not care for what they were employed on—and the young men who did just what they were compelled to do and no more, found no favour in his eyes. But even those periods of idling which occurred in the work of this grey-haired secretary did not produce that effect upon his young employer.

A gentleness of feeling, little habitual to him, stole over John. He did not feel critical—he felt friendly, oh, so compassionate, afraid even to think anything that could add a pang to this man, so forlorn and miserable, denuded of all things. The less he made of his own wretchedness the more profoundly did John feel it. He kept thinking, as he gave him his instructions, of all that this clear intelligence must have suffered shut up in the strait routine of a prison. He could not copy a page or make a calculation without some little running-over of remark, something that brought a smile, that betrayed the lively play of a mind unsubdued by the most tremendous burdens, by all the heavy and horrible experiences of such a life. How could he have borne that, day by day and year by year? A sort of awe, and almost reverence of the tragedy that this humorous, light-hearted being must have lived through, rose in John’s musing soul.

It was not until they were finishing their little meal together that the absence of one very natural and usual explanation between them struck the young man.

‘By-the-by,’ John said, suddenly—he was making corrections in one of the papers and did not raise his head—‘By-the-by, it seems very absurd. I don’t even know your name.’

There was a moment’s silence, and then John looked up. He found his companion’s eyes fixed upon him with his usual half smile of observation, and dubious humorous uncertainty. When John met his eye he changed his position a little with a momentary laugh.

‘I have been so long out of the habit of thinking a name necessary,’ he said. ‘My name is——’ He paused again, and once more looked at John, in whose face there was no suspicious anxiety, but only a friendly alertness of interest. Something mischievous and mirthful lighted up in the stranger’s eyes: ‘My name is—March,’ he said.

‘And mine is Sandford,’ replied John.

The mischievous light went out of the other’s look. His face grew serious; he nodded his head two or three times with gravity.

‘I know that,’ he said. ‘It is a name that I have had a great deal to do with in my life; but I don’t suppose you ever heard of me.’

John shook his head. He cleared away with his own hand the last remnants of the luncheon, over which enough time had been expended.

‘Now we’ll get to work again if you are ready,’ he said.

He knew nothing of any March. He was not aware that he had ever heard the name. And then they set to work again together pleasantly, cheerfully; John finding something inspiriting in the companionship for all the rest of the afternoon.

Next day the young man presented himself at the office, though his leave was not yet exhausted. But he did not go naturally to his own desk, to look if there were letters or special orders for him. He marched straight to the door within which the younger partner, the son of the Mr. Barrett who had received him into the office, and whom John had always found severe, had his throne. The younger Mr. Barrett was far more favourable to the young man than his father had ever been, and never spoke to him of the hospital, or the duty which lay upon him to repay his mother for her kindness, which was what the elder invariably did. It is not a subject which is agreeable even to the most dutiful of children. Repay your mother for all that she has done for you! Who could bear that odious advice? John was not angelic enough to be pleased by it. And when he had the choice it was to Mr. William Barrett that he betook himself. He found that personage in a very cheerful condition, and delighted to see him.

‘You are the very man I want. You must go off at once to those works at Hampstead. They’ve got into a mess, and no one can clear it up better than you. I was just wishing for you. But your leave is not out: how is it you’ve come back before your time?’

Then John explained that he had been privately working for a long time at a scheme of which his mind was very full. And he gave on the spot an account of it which made the junior partner open his eyes.

‘If you’ve done that, my boy, you’ve made your fortune, and ours too,’ he said, listening with great attention to John’s exposition.

‘That’s what I hope, sir,’ the young man said, with all the confidence of youth.

Mr. William Barrett listened half-bantering, half-believing. To think of so young a man having hit upon an expedient which had baffled so many older brains, seemed to him half-incredible, and he laughed and rubbed his hands even while he seriously inclined to hear all the details of the scheme.

‘It all depends upon whether it’s practicable,’ he said. ‘Do you know the lie of the country? Have you calculated the cost even of what will be required as a basis of operations?’

‘I have calculated everything,’ said John, with that enthusiastic conviction which is so contagious. Mr. Barrett looked in his face with a laugh, half-sceptical, half-sympathetic.

‘I like young men to think well of their own schemes,’ he said; ‘and I like them to plan big works even if they should never come to anything. Show me your papers——’

‘I am having them copied out. I am making the statement as clear as possible. I will bring them as soon as they are ready.’

‘Oh, they are not ready, then!’ Mr. Barrett cooled perceptibly. ‘You should not have said anything about it until they were in a state to be inspected—copying was not necessary—the rough notes are what I should have liked to see. You had better go off to Hampstead at once, and when you have finished that job you can bring me your plan, if it is ready then. There may be something in it—one can never tell.’

John felt that this was a very summary dismissal after the gleam of favour with which he had been regarded. He felt as if the plan which had been so much in the forefront of his imagination had been cast all at once into the background, which discouraged him for the moment: all the more that his own judgment agreed with what his chief said, and he felt now that it would have been better to place the scribbles of his rising invention before the experienced eyes which could see at a glance what was practicable in them, instead of the fair copy written out in a strange hand, which his impulse in favour of poor March had alone moved him to make. However, he set out at once for Hampstead, according to his orders, and there forgot his discouragement, and even, for a time, his great scheme, in the counter excitement of bringing order out of chaos. There is a certain satisfaction in finding that a piece of business has been horribly mismanaged, when one feels that one can put it all right. For some days John was fully occupied with this work, with scarcely time even to think of anything else. He got home at night late and very tired with his day’s work, feeling able for little more than to give a glance at what March had been doing and to feel the comfort and satisfaction of having an amanuensis who arranged his papers so carefully and copied so neatly, in a handwriting, which, John remarked with surprise, was very like though better than his own. Everything was carefully arranged in the most orderly manner, the scraps of calculation in their proper succession, and the work going on, though slowly. It was indeed going on very slowly, and John never found his secretary at work when he returned: but he reflected that in all likelihood that philosopher, left to himself, took things easily; and there was no hurry: and he was too tired in the evenings when he came back from his work to give his full attention to anything else.

The Hampstead work occupied him for about a fortnight. On the morning after its completion he got up with a new start of energy, and with a revival of interest and enthusiasm betook himself to his great scheme. To his surprise, however, he found the little collection of calculations, sketches, and estimates, in the very same condition in which he had placed them in March’s hand, all very neatly arranged and in proper order, but without a trace of the fair copy for which he had given instructions. John was exceedingly startled, and did not know what to think. Had it not been done at all? had the patience of the unfortunate amanuensis or his self-control given way, and the work been thrown up? But then John had seen a considerable part of it completed. He had even, as has been said, looked over a portion of it, and remarked that March’s handwriting was like his own. What could this mean? An alarm which he felt to be absurd, at least excessive, most likely altogether uncalled-for, took possession of him. He called his landlady and asked her if Mr. March had said anything, if he had left any message, if he had been at work the day before? John’s landlady was the impersonation of respectability: she did not lose her temper or break forth into abuse. But her air was that of an offended woman, and she immediately replied that she had been about to speak to him on the subject, that she could not have such persons in her house.

‘Persons?’ John said, with surprise, and then Mrs. Short, keeping her composure with difficulty, informed him that she had nothing to say against ‘the old gentleman,’ who she allowed was pleasant-spoken, and looked respectable, though she much feared he liked a drop: but that the other was the one as she could not abide.

John learned with some annoyance that Joe had come daily while he was absent, and had made his way into the room where March sat at work—but that for the last two days neither of them had appeared at all.

‘And very glad I was: for I couldn’t have stood it another day, not another day, Mr. Sandford, much as I think on you, sir. A fellow like that slouching in as if the place belonged to him: and who could tell what he mightn’t bring—disease, or vermin, or dirt: dirt sure enough, for Jane did nothing but sweep up after him. Glad was I when they both went away.’

‘The day before yesterday?’ said John, ‘and no message, not a word to explain.’

‘The old gentleman came in the morning. He had the papers out as usual, and was a-going to begin: and then the other one came for him, and they both went away.’

All John’s questions could elicit nothing more than this. He said to himself that March must have taken something to finish at home; that perhaps he might have fallen into one of those paroxysms of drinking with which John was acquainted among his men. He was angry with himself for the apprehensions that stole into his mind. If this man had not been what he was—a convict, a man without a character, John said to himself, it never would have occurred to him to fear. Joe, indeed, was not to be trusted with spoons or even great-coats or anything portable; but what could Joe know about the value of his papers? It was ridiculous to think of any theft. No doubt the easiest explanation was the true one—that March had taken the papers to complete at home. With this he tried to content himself, and, with the idea that after all he was but doing what he ought to have done at once, gathered up his own rough notes and calculations, and set out for the office. There seemed a slight excitement there at his appearance, or so he thought. The vague uneasiness in his own mind no doubt gave a certain aspect of curiosity and commotion to the clerks in the outer office, who looked up at him as he came in.

‘Mr. Barrett, I think, was looking for you, Sandford. You will find them both in Mr. William’s room,’ said the principal of the outer office.

John walked in, not without a growing sense of trouble to come; he did not know what it might be, but he felt it in the air. Some thunder-bolt or other was about to fall upon his unaccustomed head.

CHAPTER II.
MR. SANDFORD’S SECRETARY.

This was what had happened in the meantime, while John had been about his other work. The man whom he had so readily taken up, knowing nothing of him except harm, had begun with quite an élan of sympathetic industry while the young man was with him. It was his nature so to do; had John remained with him all the time he would have continued so, with a generous desire to second and carry out all his wishes. But, when left alone to his work, his interest flagged. He settled everything in the most neat and orderly way, for he was always orderly, always ready to arrange and keep a certain symmetry in his surroundings, a kind of gratifying occupation which was not work.

When he had spread out his ink, his pens, his pencil, and ruler, his blotting-paper, and all the scraps he had to copy on the table before him, he began his work, and wrote on for half-an-hour at least with the air of a man who knew no better pleasure. But when he got to the conclusion of the page he laid down his pen and began to think. He had a quickly working mind, readily moved by any suggestion, taking up a cue and running on from it in lines of thought which amused him sometimes with a certain appearance of originality, enough to impose upon any chance listener, and always upon himself. This led him into mental amplifications of the text that was before him, and gave him a certain pleasure at first even in his work of copying. He thought of two or three things which he felt would be great improvements upon John’s plan as he went on, and at the end of each page he mused for an hour or so upon that and a hundred other subjects into which it ran. And then he roused up suddenly and turned the leaf and wrote a few sentences more; and then it occurred to him that it was time to eat something, as his breakfast had been a very light one.

He went out accordingly, having still money in his pocket, to get his luncheon, and lingered a little to wash down the hot and savoury sausage which was agreeable to a stomach not in very good order, and met Joe, who was hanging about on the outlook for his mate. Joe returned with him to pilot his friend safely through the little-known streets to the room in which John, in his simplicity, had believed his protégé would be safe from all such influences, and went in with him to bear him company. Then, after March had rested from these fatigues, his comrade aroused his interest not unskilfully.

‘I ’eard him say,’ remarked Joe, ‘as them papers would make ‘is fortin.’

‘So he thinks, poor lad; and I hope they may, for he’s a good lad and has been very kind to me.’

‘Droll to think you can make a fortin’ by writin’ on bits of paper,’ said Joe, touching John’s notes with his grimy hand (and indeed that opinion is shared by many people), ‘is it story-books, or wot is it!’

Mr. March laughed with genuine enjoyment, leaning back in his chair.

‘No, you ignoramus,’ he said; ‘don’t you see its figures, calculations, things you can understand still less than story-books? It’s a great scheme, Joe, my fine fellow, for turning the water out of the river and making the floods into dry land.’

‘You’re laughing at a poor fellow, guv’nor. I aint no scholard. And what’ll be done with the land? Will he farm it, or build on’t, or what’ll he do with it, when he’s got it? Doin’ away with the river would be little good, as I can see.’

‘Joe, you are a donkey,’ said his mate; ‘don’t you know there’s floods every year, and water in the houses, and water on the fields, and destruction everywhere. And this young fellow is an engineer, and means to put a stop to that.’

‘Oh!’ said Joe. Then, after a pause, he added, ‘It ’ud be the landlords o’ them places that would get the profit o’ that.’

‘Landlords and everybody; it would be a great advantage to the country, and would make our young man’s fortune, as he says.’

‘If I was you,’ said Joe, ‘I’d go on ahead with that. If it’s you that’s writing it out, you’ll go shares in the profits, I reckon.’

March resumed his pen at this incentive and began once more to write.

‘No,’ he said, shaking his hand, ‘not shares; for I have really nothing to do with it except to copy it; but I’ve no doubt he will pay me, and pretty well too——’

‘I daresay,’ said Joe, ‘if he’s that sort of a cove for finding out things, as he has a many more in his head as well as this.’

‘I should think most likely,’ said the elder man. ‘He’s got a good brain—and plenty of energy, and fond of his profession—which is a good thing, Joe. Neither you nor I have been fond of our professions, unfortunately for us.’

‘I ain’t got one—not even a trade. I was brought up to hang about, and do odd jobs. I never had no justice in my bringing-up.’

‘Ah, that was a pity,’ said his companion; ‘perhaps, however, it wouldn’t have mattered much. Hanging about is the trade of a great many men, Joe, more successful men than you and me.’

‘It depends on the nature o’ the jobs you gets,’ Joe remarked. He drew his chair a little nearer to the writing-table. ‘I’d get on with that there work, guv’nor, if I was you,’ he said, with a nudge; ‘if there’s a fortune in it for one, there might be a fortune in it for two.’

March looked at him hazily with an afternoon look of drowsiness and languor; but he was tickled by the advice thus given, and resumed the so-easily-relinquished work. Joe, so to speak, sat or stood over him all day, encouraging and stimulating. The work went on slowly, as John remarked in the evening, but still it went on. The next day and the next passed in much the same way, except that Joe, ‘hanging about’ as usual, managed to meet his comrade on his way to instead of after luncheon, and so secured a clear head and less drowsy condition for the afternoon. At last, chiefly by the exertions of this very unusual overseer, the work was concluded, and then Joe spoke his mind more clearly.

‘It’s you as has had most part of this work, guv’nor, but it’s he as’ll get the pay.’

‘That’s the way of this world, Joe,’ said his comrade. But he added after a moment, with a magnanimous air, ‘Not in this case, however—for I have only copied, I have not invented—though I may have given a few hints.’

He had given these hints only to himself, various suggestions having occurred to him in the course of his copying, which in some instances he had inserted with the wildest ignorance of practicability in his text.

‘I make no doubt,’ said Joe, ‘as the best of it come out o’ your head, guv’nor. You was always the one as had the brains; and it’s you as should profit by it. A young fellow like that’s got no occasion to make his fortune at his age. It ain’t good for him. When you make your fortune like that right off, it puffs you up with pride, and it stops you doing more. Ain’t that true? Why, you knows it is;—chaplains and parsons and all that sort say so. It’s good for you to be kep’ down when you’re young. It would be a thousand pities to spoil a young fellow’s life like, with getting everything that he wants first thing afore he’s had any experience. That’s what has always been said to me.’

‘There is some truth in it, no doubt,’ said March.

‘A deal of truth, guv’nor. I suppose, now, you’ve just got to take them papers to somebody as deals in things like that, and get money for ’em down on the nail?’

‘He will take them to some great engineering firm,’ said the other. ‘And probably he would not part with them for a sum “down on the nail,” as you say. Such a scheme as this he’d be sure to have some share in it. He would superintend the carrying out of his plans, if you understand that. It might be years of work for him, and the most excellent beginning. I should think he deserved it, too,’ said John’s amanuensis, looking round approvingly, ‘for there is every evidence that he’s a fine fellow, and I know he has been very kind to me.’

‘And you might be very kind to ’im, in that way,’ said Joe.

‘I could be—kind to him? I don’t think I’ve very much in my power one way or other,’ said March, with a smile and a sigh.

‘Guv’nor,’ said Joe, ‘you never was one as took things upon you. Give up to other folks, that was allays what you would do. But what’s the good? You don’t get no thanks for it. If I was in your place—as I’m a donkey, and good for nothing, but you ain’t, and could do a lot if you liked—I know what I’d do.’

March smiled benignantly enough upon the poor dependent, whose flatteries were not unpleasant to him.

‘And what would you do, if you were me, which is not a very likely change?’ he said.

‘No, it ain’t likely. Them as is born asses, dies asses—and t’other way too. It ain’t for me to tell a clever man like you, and that has got a fine education, and born a gentleman.’

‘Alas!’ said March, shaking his head; ‘alas! it hasn’t come to much, has it? Your mate, my poor fellow, and one without a friend but you, or a chance in the wide world——’

‘Don’t say that, guv’nor. Here’s a chance, if I ain’t more of a born ass than ever I thought—a chance for a fortune, and for doing the young fellow a good turn. How’s he, at his age, to show up a big thing like this? There’s nobody as would believe it of him. They’d say, “Oh, get along, you boy.” They’d never take him in earnest at all.’

‘I do him a good turn! I, a broken man, without character or anything; without a friend! and he a fine, respectable young fellow, well thought of, and clever, and knowing more than I ever knew at my best. That’s nonsense, Joe.’

‘Not if you’ll think a bit, guv’nor; I hear him say them papers is my fortune—and then I hears him ’eave a sigh. He’s not one of the pushing ones, he isn’t. He knows as they’re worth a deal, but he hasn’t the face to say “Look here, you give me so much for this.” Guv’nor, I know you’re a man as will do a deal for a friend. Why don’t you take ’em just as they lies there, and take ’em to some person as deals in that sort of thing, and just up and ask ’em what’ll they give for this? “There’s a young un,” says you, “as understands everything about it and is just the man to work ’em out.” If I were in your place, guv’nor, that’s what I would do.’

‘But, my good fellow,’ said March, ‘those papers belong to the young man here, not to me.’

‘Guv’nor,’ said Joe, ‘I don’t doubt as the best that’s in that long story as you’re writing out there comes out o’ your own ’ead. It stands to reason as you know more about it than a young feller like ’im.’

The philosophical gull, who never learned wisdom, was touched by this in the most assailable point.

‘It’s true,’ he said, ‘Joe,—though how you’ve found it out I can’t tell—that I have carried out a suggestion or two, and put in something that seemed to me the logical consequence of what he said. But nothing practical, for I don’t understand the practical part. And how does that sort of thing give me any real claim?’

‘Guv’nor,’ repeated Joe, ‘you needn’t tell me. I know you, and how you’re always giving up to other folks. It’s half yours and more, I’ll be bound. And the best you could do for the young ’un is just what I tells you. I’m practical, I am. If it was anything in my way, I’d do it like a shot; but it ain’t in my way. The outsides o’ things has a deal of power in this world. You in your fine respectable suit, you can go where you please like a prince. But me, it’s “Be off with you—get along with you;” they won’t say nothing of that sort to you. And you’ll just make the young man’s fortune, that’s what you’ll do. Say as he’s the very one to look after the works and knows all the practical part. They ought to settle something handsome on you at once as your share and take him on as foreman, or whatever it is; and in that way you’d both get the best of it and all done well.’

The convict philosopher shook his head. He rose up from the table and put the papers away. He admired the neatness of his own manuscript extremely, and he was of opinion that he had done John a great deal of good by the suggestions which he had worked out and the additions which he had made. It was possible that Joe might be right, and that the best thing he could do for his young employer was what the poor faithful fellow had suggested. He had himself a great admiration, after having been deprived of it so long, of his respectable suit and appearance, and there was a great deal of plausibility, he thought, in what the man said. But it was still clear to him that John might not think so. He was not very rigid himself upon any point of morals, after his long practice in thinking everything over, and blurring out to his own satisfaction the lines of demarcation between right and wrong; but he could understand that the young man, not having his experience, might think otherwise; and he had even a sympathy for his want of philosophical power in that respect. So he put everything aside very tidily, and put his hand upon Joe’s arm and drew him away, shaking his head, but not angry at the good fellow’s insistence. There was something in it—and it might doubtless be under certain circumstances the most kind thing that could be done for the young man. Still there was the difficulty that the young man might not see it in that light. And Mr. March accordingly put up the papers, and taking Joe by the arm, with a benevolent smile and a shake of the head, led him away.

It has been said that John’s rooms were in Westminster, not far from Great George Street, where the offices of Messrs. Barrett were, and where, as the reader needs not to be informed, various other engineers’ offices are to be seen. March’s eye caught the names involuntarily as he passed by. It was not that he was trifling with temptation, for he did not consider Joe’s suggestion as temptation. He was only turning over the possibilities in his mind, and merely as a matter of amusement, an exercise of fancy, just as he might have counted how many white horses passed in the street, or which windows were curtained and which not, he read over to himself the names on the doors. Messrs. Barrett’s was one which he weighed but afterwards rejected, as not liking the sound of it. Another quite near had a name that pleased him better—Messrs. Spender and Diggs. What a ludicrous combination! He laughed to himself at it, as it caught his eye. Spender and Diggs—it was highly suggestive, which was a thing dear to his mind at ease. It clung to his memory. He turned it round the other way to see how it would sound. Diggs and Spender: that was still more absurd.

And all the time Joe’s voice was running on with arguments, the form of which, simple and subtle and couched in that language of the rough which is always more or less picturesque, amused his companion much. Joe had penetrated sufficiently into the mind of his mate to know how to address him. And that mind began to work upon the matter, with the amusing addition of the name of Spender and Diggs thrown in, and a great deal of pleasurable occupation in a question entirely characteristic and full of the difficulties he loved.

The result was that March appeared in the morning as the landlady had said, and spent a short time, but only a very short time in John’s sitting-room. The copy was completed, carefully folded up, and put in a large envelope. All John’s notes, the originals, were scrupulously left in their place, and in perfect order. For in some points his conscience was of scrupulous nicety, and John’s notes were certainly his own and not to be tampered with. As he was going out with the large envelope in his breast pocket, John’s landlady appeared with the remonstrance which had been on her lips for some days.

‘You, sir, I’ve got no objections—a gentleman that’s pleasant spoken and respectable even if he ain’t my lodger, but only a friend, that’s a different thing:—— but your—— that man——’

‘My servant?’ said March, with a quick sense of the comicality of the situation.

‘Well, sir,’ said the woman, with hesitation; ‘I wouldn’t keep on a man like that in my service if I was you.’

‘He is not as bad as he seems,’ the philosopher said, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘but I foresaw your objections, and you shall never see him more.’

‘If that’s so, of course, there isn’t another word to be said.’

‘That’s so; you may calculate upon it as a certainty,’ the pleasant spoken gentleman said; and with a wave of his hand and a chuckle of enjoyment he went away.

The events thus described will explain the scene which John to his consternation and amazement encountered when he stepped into Mr. William’s room at the office, and found himself confronted by both members of the firm.

CHAPTER III.
JOHN ON HIS TRIAL.

Both the partners were together in Mr. William’s room. They had been having some sort of a consultation, it was evident, and both looked very grave. When John walked in at his ease, though a little anxious, they both turned round upon him with very serious faces—the younger man with a grieved air, the elder one rigid and solemn, like a judge before whom a criminal has appeared, whose conviction has been pre-accomplished, and who has come up for judgment. Mr. William Barrett had the air of hoping that some more evidence might be discovered which would possibly exonerate the accused, but his father’s face showed no such hope. On the contrary, something of the ‘I always knew how it would be’ was in his look, as he turned sharply round at the opening of the door.

John was greatly surprised: but still more indignant at this reception of him. He walked up to the table at which Mr. Barrett sat. Mr. William stood with his back to the dusty fireplace close by. Neither of them spoke, but looked at him with that overwhelming effect of silent observation which makes the steadiest footstep falter, and conveys embarrassment and awkwardness into the most self-controlled being. John said ‘Good-morning,’ and they both acknowledged it: Mr. William by an abrupt nod, his father by the most solemn inclination of his head. The young man did not know what to say. He stood and looked at them, wondering, indignant, taking his little packet of papers out of his pocket. What had he done to be so regarded?—or had he perhaps come into the midst of some consultation about other matters with which they were pre-occupied? He said,

‘Is there anything the matter?’ at last, saying to himself that it was impossible he could be the cause of such concentrated solemnity, and looking at the younger partner with a half smile.

‘There is a great deal the matter,’ said Mr. Barrett.

‘Yes,’ said his son; ‘it’s rather a grave business, Sandford. I don’t see it in quite the same light as my father. Still, it’s at least a great want of confidence, a strange slur upon us, who, so far as I know, have nothing to reproach ourselves with in respect to you.’

‘Certainly not, sir,’ said John: ‘you have always been very kind and given me every opportunity; but I hope on my part I have not done anything to make you suppose I am ungrateful, or have not appreciated my advantages.’

‘We have nothing to complain of so far as the works are concerned. I think, sir, I may say that?’

‘It is a point on which I should not like to commit myself,’ said the senior partner. ‘These works at Hampstead, so far as I hear——’

‘They went wrong when he was away. He can’t be blamed for that: he came back before his time and went over at once, and made every thing shipshape again. He can’t be blamed for that. Whatever went wrong was after his leave began.’

‘An engineer,’ said the elder gentleman, in his rigid way, ‘who means to do justice to his profession, doesn’t want leave. The works are his first interest—he has no occasion to go away to amuse himself.’

‘Oh, come, father! you’re making that a fault which is no fault—and we have a ground of offence which is real enough. Sandford, you came here the other day and told me of a scheme you had for draining the Thames valley. You may say I was disposed to pooh-pooh it a bit; but I didn’t say more than one does naturally with a young fellow’s first ideas, which are always so magnificent. Do you think there was a reason in anything I said for transferring the papers as you’ve done to another firm?’

‘I transfer them to another firm?’ cried John, ‘you must be dreaming. I have them here.’

‘You have them there? Then what do Spender and Diggs mean by spreading it abroad that they have had such a scheme sent to them by one of the pupils in our office, but which we had not enterprise to take up?’

‘Spender and Diggs!’ John was so well acquainted with the name of the rival firm that it raised no sense of humour in his mind: but something quite different, that sense of rivalry which is so strong between the pupils and partisans of different schools. He made a little pause, staring at his younger employer. And then he said, ‘I don’t know the least in the world what you mean.’

‘There is no ambiguity at all about my meaning. I say that Spender and Diggs are putting it about everywhere that a great scheme, worked out by one of our pupils, for the draining of the Thames valley, has been offered to them.’

John’s countenance grew pale with horror and dismay. He cried out, sharply,

‘Good heavens! Why, it cannot be Horrocks or Green?’

‘Don’t add slander to your other sins,’ said Mr. Barrett, severely, ‘or endeavour to take away the character of young men who are quite incapable——’

‘So they are,’ said John, in all good faith, ‘quite incapable. That is true, sir; but I could not help thinking for a moment that I might have left some of my papers about, and that they might have picked them up—but you’re right, sir; they couldn’t do it—that is a great relief to my mind.’

The young man was so undisguisedly relieved and so perfectly straightforward in the whole matter, that William Barrett began to doubt. He cast a glance at his father, who, however, sat rigid and showed no relenting.

‘Sandford,’ said the younger man, ‘you seem to speak very fair; but there’s this fact against you—no one supposed it was anyone’s scheme but yours; you are the only man in our office capable of anything of the sort; we all know that. And it’s no crime; but it is a horrid thing all the same—a caddish, currish sort of thing—to abandon the people who have trained you and done you every justice, and carry what I have no doubt you believe would be profitable work to another house.’

‘I—carry work to another house! It is quite impossible that you should believe that of me. I might have thought it if you had said I had killed somebody,’ said John, with a faint smile of ridicule, ‘for that’s a thing that might be done in a moment’s passion—but carry work to another house! You cannot believe that of me.’

‘What has believing to do with it,’ said Mr. Barrett, ‘when there are the facts that can be proved? Don’t lose time bandying words, Will. Sandford must see that after this there can be no further connection between us. He knows, of course, that his place at Spender and Diggs’ is safe enough. Let him have what is owing to him and let him go. I took him without a premium for his mother’s sake, and for the same reason—for Mrs. Sandford is a very worthy woman—I’ve given him every advantage, although I expected something of this sort all along.’

‘Why should something of this sort have been expected from me? What have I done? I have done no wrong—I have all my papers in my pocket. You said you would rather have the rough notes. Here they are, every one,’ cried John, taking out the papers from the envelope and throwing them done on the table; ‘here are all the calculations, diagrams, and drawings, and all. And now, Mr. Barrett, there is the question to settle which you’ve just mentioned, which you raised long ago,’ said the young man, with a flush of pride and anger. ‘That wretched premium! It shall be paid before the banks close to-day. That, at all events, I can settle at once. You have flung it in my teeth more than once when I was powerless. Now I have it in my own hands. Your premium, of which you have thought so much, shall be paid to-day.’

‘Stop there, Sandford,’ said the younger partner. ‘Father, I beg don’t say anything more—let us understand the more important matter first. You say you have brought us all your papers here. And yet I am informed from Spender and Diggs that they have your scheme, all carefully written out and elaborated——’

‘Ah!’ cried John, with a keen and quick sensation as if he had been startled and could not draw his breath.

‘Of course the information doesn’t come direct from them. They wouldn’t be likely to do anything so friendly. Prince heard all about it from one of their men. We can have him in, and you can ask him any questions you like. Even if I hadn’t known by what you told me, I should have felt sure it was you who had done it,’ said William Barrett, secure in his own command of the situation. Then he added to the man who answered his bell, ‘Ask Mr. Prince to step this way.’

Mr. Prince had stepped that way; he had walked up to Mr. Barrett’s table, in his precise little manner, smiling ingratiatingly when he met his master’s eye, and had told his story before John said anything more. He stood a little behind Prince, so startled that he could scarcely understand what was being said, though he heard it all—recalling his recollections and making it plain to himself what had happened. He had not been in the habit of doing rash things, nor was he one who gave his confidence and trust easily; but as he stood in the office, hearing the clerk’s glib story—and feeling himself like the spectator of the strangest little scene on the stage, instead of standing, so to speak, on his trial, and listening to the evidence of the principal witness against him—a rush of suggestions was going through John’s head.

The extraordinary fact which never had seemed at all strange to him before, that he had taken into his house and into his confidence a man of whom he knew nothing, except that he was a returned convict, showed itself all at once to him in the clearest light. Even in his suddenly awakened consciousness of what had happened, he felt that to call the man whom he had thus trusted a returned convict, hurt himself as if it had been a stab. It was on this ground he had made acquaintance with him, because he was a man who had been punished for crime, and might fall into crime again if he were not bolstered up by friendly help and saved from temptation. This was what John had attempted to do, and, lo, here was the result. He came gradually to himself through the hot and painful confusion of this critical moment, and put a few questions to the clerk which left no doubt on the subject. When Mr. Prince’s examination was over, William Barrett turned to the young man, his natural good nature and friendliness modified by the triumph of having gained a complete victory.

‘Sandford,’ he said, ‘I don’t pretend to understand your conduct one way or another. You came back from your holiday before your time, to tell me of this scheme of yours. I neither said nor did anything to discourage you, more than one does naturally to a young man. You were engaged in our work, and bred up in our office: that should have been reason enough against going to any other firm.’

‘It is a thing which never entered into my mind.’

‘But it did into your actions, apparently,’ said the junior partner, with a not unnatural sneer.

‘It is what I have expected all along,’ said Mr. Barrett, piously folding his hands. ‘It is what his mother expected, an excellent, much-tried woman, for whose sake——’

‘Prince, you may go,’ said William Barrett, ‘and, for heaven’s sake, father, stick to the question. Don’t bring in other things which have nothing to do with it.’

John had a great struggle with himself. The foregone conclusion against him with which he had so often been confronted was the one thing which overcame his good sense and self-control. Ever since his grandfather’s death it had been intolerable to him, and it was all he could do to suppress the boiling-over of passionate resistance to this systematic injustice; but with a great effort he restrained himself. He stopped the departing witness with a wave of his hand.

‘Let Prince stay,’ he said, in a choked voice. ‘I think I perceive how all this has occurred. Look here, did your informant say who took the papers to Spender and Diggs? Did he say it was I?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Prince, ‘that he knew you.’

‘I have not the least doubt that you asked him who it was. If he did not know me, he must at least have known something about me. Did he say it was I?’

‘Well,’ said the witness, somewhat unwillingly, ‘he didn’t know who it was. He said he thought it was an elderly man: but there are many people always coming and going about the office, and he couldn’t be sure.’

‘Do you think it likely,’ said John, ‘that I could have gone to Spender and Diggs’ office without being recognised?’

‘Sandford, this is all quite unnecessary,’ said William Barrett. ‘I did not accuse you of going to Spender and Diggs’ office. You might have employed any agent; such a thing is not necessarily—indeed, it’s not at all likely to be done by the principal himself.’

‘Then this is what I’m accused of,’ said John. ‘I came and told you of my scheme, for as much as it’s worth. You did discourage me, Mr. William, but good naturedly, telling me to go to Hampstead in the first place. I obeyed you, and finished that work last night. This morning I come to you with my papers in my pocket, ready to submit them to you according to your own instructions; and I am met with accusations like a criminal. Is it likely that between hands I should have gone to Spender and Diggs? Why should I come here now with my original papers if I had in the meanwhile sent a copy elsewhere? Do Spender and Diggs say they refused them? What are they supposed to have said? Why am I supposed to have come, the first moment I was free, back here——?’

‘Were you told they were refused?’

‘No, sir,’ said Prince. ‘On the contrary, they were taken into consideration, and thought to have something in them. That was what was reported to me.’

‘Why, then,’ said John, ‘should I come back here?’

There was a momentary pause; and then William Barrett broke forth again.

‘What’s the use of talking of motives and reasons and why you did it? Evidently you did do it, and there’s an end of the matter.’

‘And of our connection,’ said his father. ‘A young man that’s so false to his employers can have no more to do in our works or our office.’

‘As you please, sir,’ said John. He had made a pause of indignation, staring at his accusers, dumb with the passion of a thousand things he had to say—but what was the use? He shut his lips close, growing crimson with the strong effort of self-restraint. ‘I am sorry this should be the end,’ he said, controlling himself desperately, ‘but, of course, if that is your opinion, I have nothing to say. Good-bye, sir,’ the young man cried, unable to keep back that Parthian arrow, ‘it must be a pleasure to you that I have justified your certainty, and gone to the bad at the end.’

‘Sandford!’ said William Barrett, as John hurried out; but the young man was too much excited to pay any attention. The junior partner followed him to the door of the office calling after him, ‘Sandford—I say Sandford—Sandford!’

But John paid no attention. He rushed downstairs two or three steps at a time, and over the threshold which he had crossed so often with the familiarity of every day life. His feet spurned it now. He seemed to be shaking the dust from him as the rejected messengers were to do in the Gospel. No better servant had ever been, no more dutiful pupil, and he was conscious of this. He had never been without a thought indeed of advancement in his own person, of carrying out a work of his own: but all his knowledge, the knowledge acquired out of their limits in the privacy of his own self-denying and studious youth, had been at the service of his masters and teachers unreservedly at all times. He had never thought of sparing himself, of doing as little as was possible, which was the way of many of his fellow-pupils. He had done always as much as was in him, freely and with devotion. And as the climax of so many faithful years, he had brought to them this first fruits of his maturing thought, this plan so long cogitated, which had been to him what a poem is to a poet—the work in which all his faculties, not only of calculation and practical reason, but of thought and imagination had been concentrated. It was to be the climax, and now it was the end. Instead of sharing his honours with them and bringing them substantial profit, as he intended, he was sent forth with shame as a traitor, a false servant, a disloyal man. John’s heart burned within him as, holding his head high, and spurning the very ground, he marched out of that familiar place.

The sting of injustice was sharp in his soul. He said to himself that he would offer no further defence, that he would not attempt to prove the deception that had been put upon him, or how it was that he had been robbed at once of his scheme and honour. If it could be believed for a moment by people who had known him for years that he was so guilty, he would make no attempt to explain. If ever an accusation was unlikely, unreasonable, inconsistent with every law, it was this.

CHAPTER IV.
DEFEATED AND WRONGED.

He had walked a long way before he came to himself out of those whirling circles of thought in which the mind gets involved when it is suddenly stung by a great wrong, or startled by a poignant incident. With this strong pressure upon him, he had gone right away into the Strand, and along that busy line of streets into the din and crowds of the city, feeling, like a deaf man, that the noise around made it more possible to hear the voice of his own thoughts, and to endure the clangour of his heart beating in his ears. He walked fast, not turning to the right nor to the left, straight through the bewildering throng in which every man had his own little world of incident, of sentiment, and feeling undisturbed by the contact of others on every side.

At first it had been the keen tooth of that wrong, the undeserved disgrace that had fallen upon him, which had occupied all his sensations. But by degrees other thoughts came in. He had left Edgeley in haste to strike his blow for fortune and reputation, though he was so young, to qualify himself for a new phase of life, to put himself nearer at least to the level of Elly, to justify his own pretensions to her. The scene in Mrs. Egerton’s room suddenly flashed before him as he walked, adding another and yet sharper blow to that which he had already received. He had said that he would succeed, that he should be rich, that he had the ball at his foot. This morning when he came out of his lodgings he had felt the ball at his foot. How could it be otherwise? He knew the value of his own work. It was a work much wanted, upon which the comfort of a district, the value of the property in it, and the lives of its inhabitants might depend. And he felt convinced that he had hit upon the right way of remedying this fault of nature which had given so much trouble and cost so much suffering. What hours and hours he had thought of it and turned it over! What quires of paper he had covered with his calculations! It did not perhaps seem romantic work; but all the poetry in John’s nature had gone into it. It had been Elly’s work, too, though Elly could not have done one of all those endless mathematical exercises. It had occupied his mind for two at least of those early lovely years in which imagination is so sweet: and his imaginations had been sweet, though they had to do, you would have said, with things not lovely, cuttings and embankments, and drawings, and figures upon figures, armies of them, calculations without end. His very walks and the exercise he took, the boating which was his favourite recreation when he had any time, had all been inspired and accompanied by this. While he waited outside a lock, he was busy calculating its fall, and the weight and force of the water, and studying the banks high or low, for his purpose. He had grown learned in the formations of the district, in its geology and its productions with the same motive. He had marked unconsciously where wood could be got at and bricks made for the future works, and when his eye travelled over the river flats to the line of cottages with dull lines upon their lower storey, showing the flood-mark to which the water had risen, there rose in him a fine fervour as he thought that by-and-by all such dangers should come to an end. Thoughts frivolous and unworthy, the light and trifling mental dissipations that beguile young minds, and the insidious curiosities and temptations with which they play, were all crowded out by these imaginations, which were so practical, so professional, so enthusiastic, so full of the poetry of reality. This was the way in which many months had been occupied. And now——!

It was a long time before John had sufficiently calmed himself down, and got the mastery of those whirling circles of ever-recurring thought which almost maddened him at first, to face the situation as it now stood. At first, and for a long time, it appeared to him that ruin as complete as it was undeserved had overwhelmed him; his good fame seemed to be gone, and the bitterness of the thought that people who knew him, and knew him so well, and who had years of experience of his integrity and faithful service, should have at once believed him guilty of such treachery, seemed to drown him in a hopeless flood; for how should he convince strangers of his honour if they had no faith in it? or how attempt to clear himself professionally when two of the chief authorities in his profession believed him to have behaved so? Would it be the best way, the only way, to shake the dust from off his feet and rush away to the end of the world where a man could work, if it were the roughest navvy work, and be free from false accusation and the horror of seeing himself falsely condemned. But, then, Elly! John plunged again deeper than ever into that blackness of darkness. He had boasted in his self-confidence of the success which was awaiting him, of the certainty of his prospects. He remembered now how Mrs. Egerton had shaken her head. And now here he stood with his success turned into failure, his confidence into despair; the people who knew him best refusing to hear him. He had no fear that Elly would refuse to hear him; but who else would believe? They would not, indeed, believe that he had been treacherous, or played a villain’s part, as the Barretts did; but they would think that he had mistaken his own powers, that he was not what he imagined, that his account of himself was a boy’s brag, and not a sober estimate of what he knew he could do. And how convince them, how remedy the evil? Was it possible that any remedy would ever be found?

He had gained a little calm when he began to ask himself this question. Out of the whirl of painful thoughts and passionate entanglement of all the perplexities round him, he suddenly came to a clear spot from which he could look behind and after. He found himself on the bridge crossing the river, having got there he scarcely knew how, coming back in the direction of the office and of his lodgings after a feverish round through all the noise of London. As he walked across the bridge, there suddenly came to him a recollection of his first beginning—how he had paused there with the letter in his hand with which he had been sent to the Messrs. Barrett by his mother. He had paused, angry and wounded and sore, and looked down upon the outward-bound ships, and for a moment had thought of forsaking this cold, unkindly world in which he had no longer any home or anyone who loved him, of tossing the letter into the river and going his own way, and taking upon himself the responsibility of his own life. He had not carried out that wild resolution. He had swallowed all his repugnances, his pride, his rebellious feelings, and accepted the more dutiful way: and till now he had never repented that decision. He paused again, and before him lay the same great stream leading out into the unknown, the same ships ready to carry him thither, into a world all strange, where nobody would know John Sandford had ever been accused of falsehood. The repetition of this scene and suggestion gave him a certain shock, and brought him back sharply to himself. John Sandford, John May—he had not then been sure which he was—his heart had risen against the woman who was his mother, who had distrusted him and taken from him his father’s name. Now he was more or less ashamed of the boyish rashness which had set him against her decision in this respect. He was John Sandford now, beyond any question. What if, perhaps, this fever of indignation and despair which was in his veins might die down and pass away, as the other had done?

This brought him back to more particular questions. He had felt no doubt from the first moment as to what had really happened: that the man whom he had so foolishly trusted, whom he had no reason to trust, had played him false, and carried off the copy which John had given him to do, out of what had appeared to him pure benevolence, Christian charity—to the rival firm. That was perfectly clear to him, though in his indignation and fury he would not pause to explain. If it was explained ever so, it would not restore the scheme thus betrayed to its original importance, or place it, as he had intended, in all its novelty and originality and ingeniousness, in the hands best able to carry it out. In any case, his secret was broken, his ideas exposed to curious and eager competitors who might, and probably would, take instant advantage of them. John still felt that he was ruined, however it might turn out. And yet he might clear his honour at least, and show how he had been himself betrayed. He had begun to acknowledge this possibility, to breathe more freely, to feel the fumes of passion dispersing, and the real landscape, chilled and grey with all the rosy illusions of hope disappearing, yet still real and solid under his feet, once more coming into his sight, when he became suddenly aware of an approaching figure, very unwelcome, most undesirable to meet at such a moment, yet not to be ignored. Why should he turn up precisely now, that chance acquaintance to whom John had committed himself in the impatience of his boyhood, and with whom he had a sort of irregular, fictitious intercourse, more congenial to Montressor’s profession and ways than to his own? It brought a sort of ludicrous element into his trouble to meet this man, to whom he was not himself but another, a being who had never existed save for that one night on which he had enacted a sort of little single-scene tragic-comedy as John May. Montressor was not a person to be eluded: he came forward with his hands stretched out, his shiny hat bearing down over the heads of the other passengers upon John, as if it had been a flag carried aloft, with the directest and straightest impulse.

‘Me dear young friend,’ he said, ‘me brave boy! how glad I am to see ye.’

Montressor was a little better dressed than usual. The shiny hat was new, or almost new, though it had somehow caught the characteristics of the old one. His coat was good, his well-brushed aspect no longer giving so distinct an accentuation to his shabbiness. He put his arm within John’s in the fervour of having much to say.

‘Fate’s been good to me,’ he said, ‘and when it’s so in great things ’tis also in small. Here have I been watching for ye, wondering would ye pass hereabouts, to tell ye, me young friend, that once again good luck has come Montressor’s way.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said John; but what he felt was only a sort of dull half pang additional, a sense that good luck might now come in anyone’s way save his, which was closed to it for evermore.

‘That I’m sure of,’ said the actor, ‘it isn’t very much we’ve seen of ye, John May, and I don’t even know where to find ye. To tell the truth, in me shabbiness and me poverty I didn’t care to know: for meeting you in the street is one thing and pursuing you to your lodging is another. No. Montressor was not one to shame his friends, even though ’twas virtuous poverty. But rejoice with me, me young friend—that phase is over, never, I hope, to come me way again.’

‘Have you got an engagement?’ asked John, wondering and reflecting upon the shabbiness which was as pronounced as ever one short week before.

‘Better than that,’ said the actor. He put his hand to his eyes with a mixture of fiction yet reality. ‘Me eyes are full and so’s my heart. Pardon me, young man. Once you saved her life—never knowing that small thing was the future Rachel, the future Siddons. Me dear friend! it is Edie that has an engagement. Edie, me chyild!’

‘Edie!’ cried John, and then he laughed aloud at the thought. Edie, that baby, to whom he had sent something the other day to buy a doll.

‘Indeed, ’tis Edie, no one else. Ye haven’t seen her for a great while. Ye don’t know that she’s sixteen or near it, and a genius. She has a right to it, sir. It’s hers by inheritance. My chyild, and her mother’s—who under the name of Ada Somerset took leading parts for years—I don’t grudge it to her, me dear May. She has had devoted care. She has had a training, me dear sir, that began in her cradle—and now!’ He laid his hand upon the heart that no doubt was as full of real emotion as if he had not had a word to say on the subject. ‘And she is a good girl, and the ball at her foot,’ he added, in a tremulous tone, with water standing in his eyes.

‘The ball at her foot,’ said John, with a harsh laugh. ‘So had I yesterday—or, at least, so I thought.’

‘There’s something happened to you, me brave boy?’

‘Nothing’s happened: at least, nothing that’s wonderful or out of the way. I’m supposed to have broken trust and disgraced myself. It’s like the things that happen in your stage plays. I’m condemned for something I never thought of, and robbed by one to whom I tried to be kind. Go home and take care of Edie. Never let her try to be kind to anyone,’ John said, ‘it’s fatal; it’s nothing less than ruin.’

‘Me dear boy, open your mind to me, and relieve it of that perilous stuff. It is the best way. Come, tell me. Montressor has but little in his power even now, but what he can do is always at his friends’ disposal; and, if there’s a villain to be hunted down, trust me, me brave boy—I’ll hunt him to the death!’

‘Why should I trouble you with my vexations?’ cried John. But in the end he yielded to the natural satisfaction of recounting all that had happened to a sympathetic—almost too sympathetic—ear. Montressor’s was no indifferent backing of his friend. He threw himself with his whole soul into the wrongs of the unfortunate young man. Indeed, so entirely did he enter into John’s case that John felt himself restored to hopeful life, half by the sympathy, and perhaps a little more than half by the genial absurdity that seemed to glide into everything from Montressor’s devoted zeal. The light came back to the skies more completely in this humorous way than if some happy incident had restored it. He began to see through the exaggeration of his friend’s feeling, that after all there was something laughable in his own despair, and that a man is not ruined in a moment in any such stagy and artificial way.

While this change began to operate, and while John poured forth his tale, he pursued the familiar way to his lodgings instinctively, leading the sympathetic Montressor with him without question asked. The actor had never before penetrated so far. It had not occurred to John to invite him, especially as he had never informed him of his real name. The fact that he had been so foolish as to call himself May to this early acquaintance had raised a barrier between them more effectual than any barrier of prudence or sense that such a friendship was not one to be cultivated. But in the fervour of his confidence, and in the enthusiasm of Montressor’s sympathy, the consolation of it and the ridicule of it, everything else was forgotten. And John found himself at his own door with his faithful sympathiser before he was aware. He had opened it and bidden his friend to enter when his eye was suddenly caught by a slouching figure on the opposite side of the street, which aroused another set of feelings altogether. John thrust Montressor in, calling on him to sit down and wait, and then turning with a bound rushed across the street in the direction of this lounger, who, suddenly taking fright, had turned too, and was hurrying along as fast as a wavering pair of legs would carry him. The legs were unsteady, and little to be depended upon, though sudden panic inspired them, and they were worth nothing in comparison with youth and hot indignation now suddenly set on their track. The chase lasted but a minute. John made up to the fluttering, retreating figure, and was just about, with outstretched hand, to seize him, when the pursued suddenly turned round, meeting him with a rueful, deprecating, yet woefully smiling face, in which the same ridicule which had been rising in John’s mind towards himself was blended with a sort of helpless despair and insinuating prayer for mercy.

‘Stop,’ cried his amanuensis, the traitor who had ruined him, with that rueful smile, ‘I’ll go with you anywhere—take me where you please. I—I can’t defend myself.’

‘What have you done with my papers?’ cried John, trembling with hurry and rage, yet subdued, he could not tell how.

‘I’ll tell you,’ said the other. ‘I’ll tell you everything. Take me somewhere and let me tell you.’

The young man laid his hand upon the old man’s arm, and led him back, feeling somehow his heart melt towards the unresistant sinner. Montressor stood at the door watching this pursuit and capture. He waited for them as they came forward, his face expressing a sort of stupefication of wonder. John only remembered the spectator when he reached the door with his prisoner, and found this startled countenance confronting him.

‘Why, May!’ cried he, turning from one to another. ‘Why, May!’

CHAPTER V.
THE CULPRIT.

John’s amanuensis, whom he had so rashly trusted, had carried away his copy of John’s scheme with, in reality, little or no idea of cheating, and none at all of injuring John. His faculties were confused by long courses of meditative sophistry, such as had been his amusement in the years when he had no other, and by the criminal atmosphere in which he had lived, in which the deception or spoiling of your neighbour was the most natural matter, the best sign of talent and originality, at once the excitement and the amusement of the perverted mind. The man who called himself March had a more than usual share of that confusion which so often accompanies breaches of the moral law. He had gone through far more than usual of those mental exercises by which all but the most stupid and degraded attempt to prove themselves right, or at least not so far wrong, in those offences which to the rest of the world are beyond excuse. And his mental ingenuity was such that he could make a wonderful plea to himself in favour of any course which fancy or temptation suggested. In the present case the effort had not been at all a difficult one. He had really meant no harm to John. He intended, in fact, to recommend John warmly, to put a good thing in his way. In all probability the young man would not prove a good advocate for himself. He might be shy of pushing his own interests: most inventors were shy and retiring, easily discouraged: and what he meant to secure would not in reality be more than a percentage on the trouble he would take in recommending John. A percentage—that was what in reality it would be—and well earned: for had he not been at the trouble of copying, and indeed adding something of his own to the young man’s dry plans and calculations, besides the service he would do him in carrying his goods as it were to market and securing a sale for them, and a profitable job for their inventor. Nothing could be more self-evident than this. At the end he came to be quite sure that he was doing his young benefactor a real service, and that nothing in his conduct wanted excusing at all.

He was a little shaken, however, by his reception at the office of Messrs. Spender and Diggs, and by their instant recognition of John’s name, and their curious questions on the subject. Had the plan been rejected by Barretts, they asked—and he did not even know what ‘Barretts’ meant. He was still more dismayed when he found (though he ought to have known very well it must be so) that no answer would be given him on the subject till the papers were examined, and that it would be necessary that Sandford should come himself to elucidate and explain them. There was quite a little excitement in the office, evidently, about Sandford’s work and its presentation there. The partner who seemed to him to be Diggs (he could not tell why, from his appearance), came and looked over the shoulder of the partner who must be Spender, and one or two others were called into the council and questions asked as to whether young Sandford had left Barretts, whether there had been a quarrel, what had happened. The ignorance he showed about all this, brought suspicious looks upon him, looks which disturbed all his calculations: for it had never occurred to him that any suspicion could attach to him in respect of a document written in his own hand, and which by that very fact surely belonged to him, more or less. He was glad at last to get away, feeling a certain distrust involved in the questions that were addressed to him, and beginning to wonder what they could do to him if it were discovered to be without John’s permission that the papers were brought here. Pooh! he said to himself, but only when he had got away—nothing could be done to him; it was no wrong to John or anyone. He had a right, a moral right, to the work of his own hands: and it was in kindness he had done it; kindness qualified by a percentage which is what the very best of friends demand.

But if he was disturbed and troubled by this contretemps, Joe, who was really throughout the matter his inspiring influence, was much more so. He was angry and disappointed beyond description. He had expected, being so much more ignorant than his principal, money immediate, a sum down, for the papers which young Sandford had said were his fortune. He was furious with the feebleness of his ‘mate,’ who had left those papers without getting anything for them.

‘I’d not a’ bin such a blooming fool,’ said Joe, whose adjectives are generally left out in this record. ‘I’d a’ up and spoken. Money down or ye gets nothin’ from me. Lor, if I had a ’ansom coat to my back like you, and could speak like as them swells would listen to me, d’ye think I’d a’ come back empty-handed like that?’

March was still more confused by this vituperation. It was in vain, he knew, to convince Joe that such a rapid transaction was impossible in the nature of things, for neither Joe nor his kind know anything of the nature of things. They know that when they have anything to sell, money is to be got for it, and that is all. Joe made his patron and dependent (for the poor man was both) very uncomfortable on this subject: and other things too made him uncomfortable; the necessity for communicating with John, and informing him that he must see Spender & Diggs, and explain his scheme to them; and the necessity for going back to Spender & Diggs, which Joe had pressed upon him, incapable of hearing reason. What was he to do? The poor man hung about the street in which John lived, half hoping for an encounter which might clear up the matter one way or other. When he saw John his heart gave a jump of pleasure and relief in the first instance, and then the instinct of the offender came upon him and he turned and fled. But what was his flight worth before the pursuit of the active and impassioned youth who could have outstripped his swiftest pace in a stride or two? And then the fugitive said to himself that he was not really guilty, that he had done nothing to be afraid of. Kindness, qualified by a percentage. The rueful smile which was in his eyes when he turned to John was half conciliatory and half made up of self-approbation and amusement at the success of that phrase. Naturally, John was aware of neither of these sentiments. He pushed his prisoner before him into his sitting-room, taking no heed of the exclamations of Montressor. It was a trouble to him at all times to hear that name of May from the actor’s lips, but it was his own fault, and he could blame nobody. He thrust the culprit into his sitting-room, and pushed him into a chair without saying a word. He was breathless, not with the exertion so much as with the tumult in his mind, the eagerness, and passion. He had not expected to find thus the means of exonerating himself so soon, nor could he help a certain blaze of wrath against the man who had done him so ill a turn.

‘There!’ he said, waving Montressor aside with his hand. ‘Tell me first why you did it. What induced you to steal my papers and try to ruin me? Was not I kind to you?—was I not——’

‘Steal your papers!’ said the offender, with a look of surprised innocence. ‘I stole none of your papers. The copy which I had myself made at your request was surely by all laws of reason mine in the first place, and not yours.’

John gazed at him with a gasp of astonishment at this extraordinary doctrine, but for the first moment found nothing to say.

‘I allow,’ said the culprit, with a certain magnanimity, ‘that had I been engaged by you at, let us say, so much a day to make this copy, with a full understanding that it was to be your property, your question might be justified; but, as a matter of fact, no stipulations of the kind were made. You suggested to me that I should come here and copy your papers—with the benevolent intention of keeping me out of mischief—I suppose out of the company which you did not think good for me, of my faithful Joe.’

He had changed his position in the chair to a more easy one, and leaned forward a little, speaking, demonstrating slightly, easily, with his hand. John, in his sudden fury, and in the darkness of his distress, felt the current of his thoughts arrested, and his mind standing still with wonder. He gasped, but the words would not come.

‘But there was no engagement,’ resumed the speaker, with a smile; ‘nothing was said about so much a day. My labour was not put to any price, nor was there any time mentioned when it should be finished, or anything said about its ultimate destination. You will see that I am quite exact when you think over the circumstances. Isn’t it so? Well, then, by all laws of logic, the copy was mine, and I had a right to do what I liked with it; put it in the fire if I liked——’

‘But not to offer my scheme, my work, my ideas to—to—another firm,’ cried John, in his confusion: ‘to an opposition—to a——’

He saw he had made a mistake, but in his excitement could not tell what it was.

‘Oh,’ said March, ‘I see! Now I understand; it is a question of rivalry: they’re competitors—they’re on the other side? Certainly that wasn’t at all what I intended: and now I understand.’

It was John’s impulse to seize him by the collar, to shake the sophistry out of this bland usurper of his rights. But he did not do so. He restrained himself with a strong effort, and recovered the thread of reason which had been snatched for a moment out of his hand.

‘We might go into that,’ he said, ‘if you had the least right to take from me what was my work, and not yours. But you are too clever not to see that this is quite a secondary question. Whatever you may say, you copied those papers for me, by my orders, for payment. Bah! what is the use of arguing about such a matter? You know it as well as I do. You know my papers are stolen, that you have tried to make a profit of them, that you have taken them from me, to whom they belonged——’

John’s aspect in spite of himself was threatening: his countenance flushed, he changed his position, he clenched his hand. He was a powerful young man and the other was feeble and limp if not very old. Montressor, with his stage instinct, found it time for him to interfere.

‘May,’ he said, ‘old friend, I have always stood up for you, though I know you’ve done a dark deed. I’ve spoken for you even to this brave boy. He’s your own name, and may-be for aught I know he’s your own flesh and blood. Oh, me old friend! there used to be a deal of good in you, though weak. How could you find it in your heart to do a wrong to a young beginner? That wasn’t like what ye used to be, me old May——’

John had listened with a stupefied air to this speech. May! what did Montressor mean? He caught him by the arm.

‘The man’s name is March,’ he said.

This brought, what all other accusations had not done, a faint colour to the culprit’s face.

‘One month’s as good as another,’ he said, with a feeble laugh, ‘and begins with the same letter. So it’s you, Montressor. I didn’t notice who it was: the outer part of you is in better trim than when I saw you the other day.’

The actor replied, with a wave of his hand,

‘What has to be thought upon at present,’ he said, ‘is you and not me.’

This was not the policy of the man who was on his trial.

‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘it’s the fortune of war. The other day I was able to help you as an old friend, and now it’s you that patronise me.’

‘May,’ said John. He could not get beyond that point. What they said between themselves was nothing to him. He paid no attention to what they said. May! There swept into his mind a quick passing recollection of the feverish anxiety he had once felt to identify somehow and find out his relationship with some one of the name, and the Mayor of Liverpool, whom he had almost disturbed in his state to ask, Do you know anyone——? But he never met anywhere an individual who bore that name till now.

‘Ye see before ye,’ said Montressor, embarrassed, ‘me young friend, the unfortunate man that I was trying to recommend to you the last time we met. He says true, he was better off at that moment than I was; but that makes no difference. Yes, me noble boy. This is the May I told ye of. I have thought there was a likeness in some things between ye; but me wife would not hear me say it, for, John May, ye have the heart of a king: and me poor friend there, though he’s named the same——’

The man, who had not been listening any more than John had listened to the private conversation between his two companions, here woke up from his own thoughts with a slight start.

‘Who,’ he said, ‘are you calling John May? My name is Robert, not John at all—if it is me you mean. My father’s name was John, an honest worthy man. I always made up my mind to call the boy after him. What do you know about John May? that’s not my name, not my name at all. I’m rather in a weak state of health and I can’t bear very much. You wouldn’t speak of such things if you knew that they threw me into a tremble all over, which is very bad for me. Who do you mean by John May?’

The three men looked at each other in a tremulous quiver of excitement, like the flashing of intense heat in the air. They gazed at each other saying nothing. Montressor, though he had hitherto been calm, was growing agitated too, he could not tell why. There was a suppressed excitement in the very air round them which none of the three could fully understand. At this moment there was a knock at the door, which they all heard, as if they heard it not, without an attempt to make any reply. The world outside was for the moment blank to them; they had something more important than anything outside to settle among themselves.

CHAPTER VI.
A CRISIS.

It had been about noon when John left Messrs. Barretts’ office. It was now between three and four in the afternoon. His long walk, his talk with Montressor, the agitation and excitement of the catastrophe had made the time go as upon wings. But it had not gone upon wings at the office, where there was a great deal of commotion and discomfort, the pupils saying among themselves that for Sandford to go away in such a way was next to impossible; that little Prince, the little sneak, had told some lie—just like him; that the bosses, or the governors, or whatever other name for the heads of the office happened to be current at the moment, had made a howling mistake, and that the whole affair was nothing but a proof of the general stupidity of those teachers and overseers whom it is the mission of youth to dethrone. This agitation of feeling was not confined to the pupil-room or the outer office. It entered in, with the most serious results, to the very sanctuary of the establishment, Mr. Barrett’s own room, where Mr. William had a controversy with his father, which nothing but the decorum necessary between the heads of such a government could have kept within bounds.

Mr. Barrett was a pessimist by nature, and one who always expected to be deceived and wronged. He had heard, he forgot what, that had led him to expect evil of John, and to that idea he had clung during the period of the young man’s training with the purest faith. He had to confess from time to time that John had done very well so far, but—— He never forgot to shake his head and add that but. Now he was, if it is permissible to say so of a good man, delighted that his prophecies were justified. He told his son that he had always expected it, ‘from something his mother told me,’—though in the course of years he had forgotten what Mrs. Sandford had told him, which was not much.

William Barrett, however, was of another mind. He had liked John—he had put full faith in him, he had appreciated his practical abilities, and the good work he did, and his power of managing men, and had been disposed to look indulgently upon any theories or plans he might have. This was all the length his mind had gone when John spoke to him first of that scheme for draining the Thames Valley. He had smiled at it very good-humouredly—he had said to himself that when boys do take up an idea it is generally a magnificent one, but that it is better even to plan something on a ridiculously gigantic scale than to think of nothing at all. He was prepared, indeed, to get some amusement out of John’s Thames Valley. Perhaps there might be something in it, some idea which a maturer brain could work out. There was no telling, but at all events it would be worth looking at for the fun of it, if nothing more: a youth of that age, with no experience to speak of, tackling a business which had baffled the wisest! But it was like a boy to do so. Fools rush in—or at least pupils rush in—where engineers sometimes fear to tread.

So he looked forward with amused expectation to the production of John’s scheme. But when Prince told him that story of Spender & Diggs, the scheme took a different aspect in Mr. William Barrett’s eyes. It gained an importance, a reality which nothing else could have given it. He did not smile at the idea of this absurd youthful plan as presented to the rival office. It became immediately a serious matter; a project of the greatest importance. All at once it became possible, very likely, that the other firm, who had nothing to do with John, might be about to reap all the benefit of him, and to enter upon the greatest engineering work that had been attempted for years, through this boy at whose plans ‘Barretts’ had smiled. William Barrett had no inclination to smile now. It was deadly earnest by this time: and he could not but feel sure in the natural certainty of events that this scheme which he had pooh-poohed would be seen in its true light by the others, and would make the fortune of Spender & Diggs.

This thought had made him severe to John, though not so severe as his father: and more open to conviction. His mind was at all times more open to conviction than that of his father: and when John had burst out of the office, in the first rage of his indignation, refusing to defend himself, Mr. William, as has been said, followed him to the door, calling him back, with a compunction which he could not get rid of. This compunction did nothing but go on increasing in the blank which followed that fiery scene. And the atmosphere in the pupil’s room affected Mr. William, too, though he was not aware of it. He had a consciousness that the lads were saying among themselves, in the slang of which all elder persons disapprove, that the bosses had made a thundering mistake. Had they made a mistake? He was, in his heart, of the same opinion as the pupil-room. He did not think that John Sandford had done this thing. Now that the flurry of discovery was over, he asked himself was it likely? had the young fellow ever done anything that looked the least like it? Had he not always been as steady as a rock, always honest and true, never neglecting his employers’ interests, carrying out their orders, as good a worker as could be? Was it likely he should turn round all at once? This thought worked in his mind silently, while those boys entertained each other with saying that the bosses had made a mistake: and it was greatly stimulated by the exasperating suggestion that Spender & Diggs might reap all the profit, and might go far ahead of Barretts in the struggle for fortune and fame. Would they go ahead of Barretts? He began to remember John’s start of surprise, his question as to who it was that had carried his papers to the other office, his look of enlightenment. If they had been stolen from him, and the papers which he had flung down on the table, were, as he had said, his original scheme, Spender & Diggs might not find it so easy to shoot ahead of Barretts. On the whole, thinking it over, it was more likely that Spender & Diggs had cheated than John. It would not be the first time. They might have put one of their men up to it, to find out what the young fellow was working at. Of course it soon got abroad among the lads what one was doing—and what more likely than that the rival firm, old hands at that sort of thing, people far more used to picking the brains of other people’s pupils than to developing talent among their own, what if they had secured possession of the copy of John’s scheme by one of the underhand ways with which they were familiar? On the whole, that was really more likely than that Sandford, a lad against whom nobody had a word to say, who had always behaved well, should have gone over, without rhyme or reason, to the enemy.

By dint of long-continued reasonings like this, William Barrett worked himself up by the time he left the office to seek another interview with John. He said to himself that he would put his pride in his pocket, and go after the young fellow, who no doubt was miserable, though he had so much pluck he would not show it. His heart smote him that he had not taken all these things into consideration before, and he had visions of young Sandford’s misery and despair, which affected even the middle-aged imagination of a man quite unused to anything heroical. He felt that his father had been unkind to John, which gave him at once an impulse and a motive for seeking the young man out—for, though he respected his father, the junior partner was generally more or less in opposition to him. All these things together made him determine to go after John, and have it out with him. He got his address almost stealthily, as not wishing anyone in the office to know until he saw what would come of it, and set out from the office a little earlier than usual that no time might be lost. He found the door open when he came to the house, and being himself somewhat excited, and beyond the rule of common laws, went in without ringing the bell; and, hearing voices in the first sitting-room he came to, knocked at the door. He was thus brought into the very midst of the agitated group which we have attempted to set before the reader at the climax of their excitement. The voices ceased, after a moment, but no attention was paid to Mr. Barrett’s knock. Something of the excitement that was in the air communicated itself to him.

‘Sandford,’ said William Barrett, putting his head in at the door.

They were all silent, staring at each other full of confused trouble, suspicion, and uncertainty. Even John felt vaguely, when the original question rose up before him in the sudden apparition of Mr. William Barrett’s grave face, that another matter had since arisen which swallowed up the first. The intruder who came in without invitation, feeling somehow that here was a crisis above conventional rules found that the interest centred like the high light in a picture in the countenance of the man who sat at the table, leaning on it, his whole person quivering with a tremulous movement like palsy, his face turned, pale, with a half-anxious, half-fatuous beseeching smile upon it to the other man standing opposite to him, who on his side looked from John to the new-comer and back again with a look of amazement and confusion. John himself stood half-stupefied between them, giving no more than a glance of recognition to his employer, occupied with more urgent affairs; and yet Mr. Barrett had good reason to know that his own mission to this youth who was so strangely daring his fate, was in one sense life and death.

‘Whom do you mean by John May? John May’s not a common name, neither is Sandford. Montressor, you’re stirring up all my life, and you know it. Most things I can bear well enough. I’ve gone through a great deal. I’m hardened to most things—but not—not—to my little boy’s name. You’ve got a child of your own, and you ought to know. I’ve not seen that little chap for fourteen years. I don’t know where he is now, if he’s living or if he’s dead, and yet once he was the apple of my eye. Montressor, what do you mean with your play-acting and your stage tricks, bandying about what was the name of my little boy?’

John Sandford stood listening to these words which came out, with pauses between, in a voice which was full of real feeling, a voice so different from the easy sophistry, the humorous self-contempt, the confused philosophy which were its usual utterance—with sensations indescribable, and something like a moral overturn of his whole being: vague recollections, suggestions from the past, horrible fears, doubts, certainties, confusion, rose up in him, enveloping him like a mist. He cared no more for William Barrett than if he had been an office-boy; he forgot all the question about the Thames Valley. These things, though he had felt them half-an-hour ago to be the most momentous in the world, departed from him as if they had never been. He stood, scarcely able to see for the haze of feverish excitement that had got into his eyes, staring blindly, with all his faculties concentrated in that of hearing, listening for what would come next.

‘Sir,’ said Montressor, ‘ye do me wrong. The drama is the drama, and I love it; but stage business is not, as ye say, for common life. Me own name I don’t deny, if all were laid bare, is perhaps not Montressor. But the poor player is likewise a man. Had I any stage effect in me mind when I told ye there was one of your own name I would recommend ye to? here he stands, and a young fellow any man might be proud of. The first time I set eyes on him he saved me chyild’s life—judge if I was likely to forget his name. This, me poor friend, is John May.’

‘That’s nonsense as I can testify,’ said William Barrett, breaking in bluntly. ‘I don’t know who your friends are, Sandford, and perhaps I ought to beg your pardon for interfering; but you’re very young though you’re not perhaps aware of it. Come, gentlemen, if you’ve got any hold upon this young man I shall be glad to answer your questions about him, and let him attend to his business. He is in fact my pupil, and it’s not to my interest his mind should be disturbed from his work. Whatever stories you may have heard I must know more about him than you do. His name is Sandford. He was placed by his mother in our hands.’

‘Sir,’ said Montressor, with dignity, ‘these are me friends, both the young man and the old. I do not turn to strangers to ask for information concerning me friends. Ye may be well meaning, but ye are ignorant—and I find ye intrusive,’ said the actor, turning away with a wave of his hand.

‘Sandford!’ cried William Barrett. Capitals could not do justice to the injured majesty of this cry. Intrusive! In the rooms of a pupil taken without a premium (that even he remembered in the shock of the indignity), such a word to be applied to him!

But John said nothing. He was stupefied, or mad, or drunk, which was it? He scarcely gave his employer a look. The colour had disappeared from his face, his eyes seemed to have a film over them, his lips trembled. He said at last, almost inaudibly, looking straight before him at vacancy,

‘My real name is John May—that was my name when I was a child—the other—is my grandfather’s name.’

Then the man who had injured John, who had taken his plans from him and robbed him, and made him appear a traitor, rose up tottering, supporting himself by the table.

‘If it’s your grandfather’s name,’ he said, ‘and you were Johnnie May when you were a child—— God help us all, it’s fourteen years ago. Are you my little chap, my little man, that I used to take out of your bed in your nightgown, with your bonny bright eyes shining? Oh, God in heaven, I’m not fit to be any good lad’s father. Are you my little boy? Are you Johnnie May?’

The room and all that was in it swam in dark circles of confusing mist in John’s eyes. He grasped a chair to support himself, to defend himself; the floor seemed to give way under his feet.

‘I’ll—I’ll come back presently,’ he said.

Mr. Barrett thought more and more, with a grieved heart, that the young fellow must have been drinking, as with a sudden rush he gained the door, and clung to that again for a moment, like a man who has no control of his limbs or movements. There he paused, and, looking at them, said,

‘Wait: wait here: till I come back——’

Mr. Barrett followed him quickly, afraid of what might follow. He found John ghastly and helpless, sitting on the step of the outer door. The young man gave a little nod of his head.

‘Wait,’ he gasped, ‘I’ll be better—in a moment—I want a little air.’

‘Sandford, what is the matter? Something has happened to you; what are you going to do?’

John did not answer for a minute. He sat with his mouth open taking long breaths, as if the air had been a cordial which he was gulping down in mouthfuls. The street was very quiet, there was nobody in sight, and the air of early summer was fresh and a little chill in afternoon greyness. Presently the young man rose and smiled faintly at his companion.

‘I’m better,’ he said. ‘I’m fit now for what I’ve got to do.’

‘Tell me, Sandford, what is it you are going to do? Nothing desperate, I hope. I came to tell you I was ready to hear any explanation—’

John waved his hand with an air of almost derision.

‘Do you suppose I’m thinking of that? It’s gone far beyond that.’

‘What can be beyond that?’ cried the employer, with exasperation. Then he seized the young man by the arm. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I am afraid I must have a cab,’ said John, with his confused look, ‘for quickness; besides that I couldn’t walk. All my strength’s gone out of me.’

‘But what are you doing? What has happened? Where are you going now?’ John looked at his chief, the friend of so many years, with a piteous smile.

‘I am going to find out—if there’s any hope for me—what’s to become of me,’ he said.

CHAPTER VII.
MRS. SANDFORD’S VIEW.

Mrs. Sandford sat in her matron’s room in the light of the bay windows, making up her accounts as usual. She was regulating the lists of linen in the hospital, the surgical appliances, the provisions of all kinds. Her round of the wards had been made. The nurses had given their reports, the special cases had been visited. Her day’s work, so to speak, was done. The afternoon was the time for rest. She was occupying it, as she often did, in this necessary, but not ostentatious work, upon which so much of the comfort of the little community devoted to healing and merciful service, depended. Mrs. Sandford was known to be a great administrator: nothing was ever wanting, nothing to seek, under her management; her stores never ran out. But she was so used to this work of regulation and oversight that she did not find it very interesting. Sometimes she would lay down her pen, sometimes even lean back in her chair, which was not, however, a seductive lounge, but an ample, comfortable Chippendale, in which you sat upright very much at your ease, but had no encouragement to loll. She had things to think of apart from the hospital. A letter lay on her table among all her lists and account-books, which was from Susie, and there were things in it which made this mother, who, after all, though perhaps of sterner fibre than most, was still of the same stuff from which ordinary mothers are made—both smile and sigh. Susie’s life was undergoing new developments. A certain commotion was in it of new forces awakening, and new thoughts. Perhaps, under the most favourable circumstances, Susie was not likely to make such revelations as would justify any critic in saying that she was ‘in love'; but there were in her letter indications, little eddies which proved how the current went, straws that showed how the wind was blowing. For one thing, she kept up a continual comparison between two unknown persons, of which she herself was evidently unconscious, but which her mother perceived gradually by dint of repetition. ‘Mr. Percy Spencer tells me’—‘but Mr. Cattley says:’—she had told her mother at first all about her visitors, and how these two came and went, and talked of John. Susie had a great deal to say, too, of Elly, and had made her mother aware of all that had gone on in that respect, and also of Mrs. Egerton and her opposition, which by times extended to Susie and by times ebbed away altogether, as circumstances, or humour, or the weather moved the parish queen in one way or another. Those reports were always quite simple, and often amusing, for Susie had a quiet way of telling a story, very circumstantial and clear, which sometimes gave her readers a more luminous and humorous view than she was herself aware of. But Susie made no comparison in respect to the ladies of Edgeley. Their intercourse with her was simple. It was her visitors of the other sex who evidently produced this effect of balance and comparison in her mind.

‘Mr. Percy gave me his view of it; he takes very strong views; but Mr. Cattley tells me——’

This was always the position in which these two appeared—Percy bringing forward all kinds of opinions, decisive of many matters, social and otherwise; but Mr. Cattley always adding a criticism or comment, something that changed the issue. Mrs. Sandford, for the fiftieth time, leaned back in her chair, and put down her pen, and asked herself, with a faint, lingering smile, which softened her stern face, what Susie meant. Susie was her own child, to whom her heart was soft, her companion, the sharer of all her thoughts. The sternness which she had shown to John had never touched his sister. Susie knew her mother entirely, knew what she meant, and what her past life had been. There were no secrets between these two. Of many things in his own antecedents, John was ignorant, but Susie knew everything. All Susie’s ways of thinking had grown under her mother’s eye. She had never thoroughly known her son, but she knew Susie through and through. This made the greatest difference in their mutual relations. Mrs. Sandford was to her daughter both tender, and soft, and gentle. Susie knew how to make her laugh, to bring tears to her eyes, whereas to John there was no laughter in her. All this, and even the contrast with John, who was in no such position, drew the mother and daughter more closely together. And it was with all the mingled sympathy and alarm, and tender prescience and pleasure, and regret of that relationship, that she saw the moment coming when the child would find some one else to be nearer to her, more a portion of herself and her life than even her mother.

Mrs. Sandford felt, with that exquisite fellow-feeling which is like divination, almost before Susie did, the development of a new affection in Susie’s soul. And she leaned back in her chair between happiness and sadness, pleased to see her girl ‘respected like the lave,’ though already conscious of the desolation that desirable and good thing would bring with it—asking herself, almost with amusement, Which would it be? It was a mood more soft than was at all usual with her, and, notwithstanding the darkness that must come with the fulfilment of those dreams, it was a happy mood. That her mild Susie should have, not one but two suitors flattered and amused her. Which would it be? Mr. Cattley, in his mild, middle age, or Percy, the young priest, who had never intended to yield to the weakness of love-making? This was the subject of Mrs. Sandford’s thoughts: and other matters more painful, if any painful matters were at that moment within the possibilities of her life, had floated away like clouds from the languid sweetness of the afternoon sky.

There was something, however, in the sound of the hurried step she heard approaching which roused her. It rang along the unoccupied passages, quick, eager, hurried, yet with a little stumble of weakness in it, as of excitement gone too far, and losing hold of itself. She listened, and instantly sat upright in her chair, and put Susie’s letter away under a bundle of papers. It was perhaps something very bad brought into the accident ward, or the man in No. 4 had been taken with another attack, or—— Then something made her start a little.

‘It is his step,’ she said to herself: and he was John, the boy as she always called him in her heart.

He pushed open the door without knocking, and saying hurriedly, ‘May I come in,’ came in without waiting for permission. Her experienced eye saw at once that he had received a great shock. Either in body or mind he had been shaken violently. His hair hung in damp masses on his forehead. He was without colour, save when in speaking he suddenly reddened and then was pale again. A touch of personal disarrangement made this agitation of his appearance more remarkable. His tie had got loose, and he had not perceived it. Such a simple matter of external appearance seems to set a seal upon the profoundest commotions of life.

She cried out, ‘What is the matter?’ before he could speak a word. Then, starting suddenly with that instinctive alarm which moves us for those we love, added quickly, ‘Susie! You have had some bad news.’

‘Not of Susie,’ he said, in a breathless way. ‘Mother, I have come for you. Come with me instantly, for God’s sake!’

‘What is the matter, John? I can’t go out like this, you know. I have to make arrangements. What is it?—for heaven’s sake tell me what it is.’

‘I may never in my life ask such a thing from you again. Most likely I shall never want it. If you have any feeling for me, for God’s sake come with me. To me it is life or death.’

She put her hand upon his arm, and drew him towards her, looking in his face, feeling with a professional touch his hands and the throbbing of his pulse.

‘Something has gone amiss,’ she said. ‘Your hands are cold, and yet your pulse is high. You have had some shock.’ She got up as she spoke, and made him sit down in her chair, and put her hands upon his head. ‘Tell me what is the matter,’ she said, in that tone of mild determination with which she overawed her patients. ‘You are not fit to be flying about.’

There was something in the touch, in the maternal authority—though that was scarcely more individual to him than to any other—which touched the poor young fellow in the feverish crisis of feeling in which he was. It was a relief to sink down into the chair, to feel even its wooden arms giving him a sensation of support. And to have some one to fall back upon at such a moment was the best thing in heaven or earth. He had never wanted such a prop before. It was against all the principles of his life to look for it, and yet there was the profoundest consolation in it. He closed his eyes for a moment, and the heat and the horror of his thoughts relaxed a little. He had meant to seize upon her, to carry her away in a whirlwind of passionate haste and anxiety, to confront her with him, the stranger who had possession of John’s rooms, and seemed to claim possession of his life. That had seemed at first the only thing to do: to carry her off without warning, to bring her face to face with that unthought of, unsuspected apparition, and demand of her, ‘Who is this?’ Perhaps there had been in it a gleam of personal vengeance too, the desire to recompense with a keen, swift stroke of punishment the deception put upon him, and all the mysteries now suddenly let loose upon his head. But the touch of his mother’s hand, the anxiety in her voice, the kindness—though perhaps no more than any patient at the hospital would have called forth—over-turned all these intentions in a moment. He was wound up to such a passion of feeling that everything told upon him, and the revulsion was great. He leaned back, touching her shoulder, laying his head upon it.

‘Mother,’ he said, like a child, with a pathetic voice of reproach, ‘why did you tell me he was dead?’

‘John!’ she started so violently that the pillow of rest on which he had leaned seemed to reject as well as fail him. ‘John!’

He turned round upon her suddenly, and caught her hands in his.

‘Mother,’ he said again, ‘is it true? Mother, is it true? I have never understood. God help me, was this what it meant all the time?’

Mrs. Sandford, who was so self-controlled and so strong, trembled and quivered in his hold. She said, in a hoarse whisper,

‘What has happened? Tell me what it is.’

He held her hands fast, and would not let her go, swaying a little backward and forward as if he were shaking her, though he had no such meaning.

‘I have never understood,’ he repeated. ‘I must have been told what was not true. Now I know: you ought all to have seen that I must be told sooner or later. Is that true?’

She was a woman of great resolution, and she freed herself from him, though his hold was so close. She came round to the other side of the table, and stood looking at him, with the steady look which had daunted many a rebel. She said,

‘You are ill; you don’t know what you are saying. I should not wonder if you had had a slight sunstroke. You must go to Susie’s room, which is cool and fresh, and lie down.’

And then there ensued a moment’s parley, but not with words—with keen eyes looking into each other across the table. She stood as steady as a rock, as if she were thinking of nothing but the accidental illness of which she spoke. But John saw that the lighter part of her, the edge, so to speak, the line of her black gown, the turn of her elbow, had a quiver in them. He saw this without knowing that he saw it, as we do in moments of emotion.

‘Mother,’ he said, ‘it’s no mistake; it’s not illness. It’s what I tell you. Come with me and see him: and if you can say then that it is not true—— Ah!’ he exclaimed, with a sharp tone of distress, ‘you can’t. I see it in your face.’

Mrs. Sandford did all she could to steady herself still.

‘To see whom?’ she said. ‘To see——’ Then, with a long-drawn breath, ‘You are trying to frighten me. I know—no one of whom you can be speaking.’

‘Then why are you afraid?’ he said.

She kept standing, gazing at him for a moment more. Then a sort of shivering seized her, and in a moment all her defences seemed to fail. She gave him a look of agonised appeal, then came to him like a child flying from a suddenly realised danger, and dropped down by the side of his chair.

‘Oh, John,’ she cried, clinging to him, ‘save me. I cannot see him—oh, no, no! You don’t know what you ask. Say I am dead. Say I am—— Kill me rather, kill me! It would be kinder. Oh, no, no, no, no! I cannot, I cannot. I’ll rather die. Save me, John!’

A horrible dismay crept through and through him as he bent over her, exclaiming, ‘Mother, mother!’ trying to soothe her—but above all a profound, all-subduing pity. He had his answer; there was no possibility of misunderstanding what this meant: but the sight of the convulsed and broken figure clinging to him in utter self-abandonment penetrated to his very heart. He clasped with his own the hands that held his arm. He put down his head to the face which, full of mortal terror and misery, looked up to him imploring his protection. His protection! for her so strong, so self-sufficing, so immovable. To see her at his feet was more than he could bear.

‘Mother, I will; as far as I can, by every means I can. I will, I will—mother, it breaks my heart to see you. Then it is true, all true?’

And on the other side there seemed to rise before him another picture: the man with his smile arguing the question, persuading himself that anything he had done was, if not wholly right, at least far from being wrong, that it was the thing most natural to be done—with his air of mental confusion, yet satisfaction, his amiability, his conciliatory looks, his humorous self-consciousness, the subtle semi-intoxication which seemed to have got into his character. These things had made John smile a short time ago; they had filled him with a sort of compassionate kindness, an amused toleration of all the ways of this strange specimen of what human nature could come to. He was not amused or tolerant now. He thought with shrinking of this new, never-realised, impossible agent who had come into his life, impossible, yet, alas! real, never to be ignored again. But the first thing was his mother, his mother who, their positions reversed in a moment, clung to him with that face full of panic and anguish, flinging herself upon his protection. She, who was so strong, the embodiment of self-reliance and authority, to see her as weak as water, as weak as any poor woman, imploring her son to save her! He had never in his life till now given her more than the conventional kiss which their relationship seemed to demand when they met and parted. But now he held her close and kissed over and over again the white, agonised face which was pressed against his arm. Presently he raised her up tenderly and restored her to her seat—where gradually her panic calmed down, and she was able to speak. But it was very terrible and strange to John that she asked no questions, but took the miserable fact for granted, as if it were a thing that must have happened, that she had expected sooner or later, something inevitable in her way.

‘The only thing is,’ he said, with a sigh of subdued impatience, ‘why did you not tell me, mother. Why didn’t I know?’

His question brought the shivering back, but she replied, with an effort,

‘How can I tell you? We thought it was better so. I would not have you exposed to that knowledge. You were so young—and then it might never have been necessary—it might never have come——’

‘You mean that he might have died—there?’

‘It would,’ she said, bowing her head, ‘have been better so.’

‘Without anyone to stand by him or say a word, without love or succour,’ he cried. Was there not another side to the question? He thought she drew herself away from him with a renewed movement of alarm, and he rose from her side, too pitiful to be indignant, his heart wrung with contending thoughts.

She held out her hands to him with another outcry of terror.

‘Don’t go! I have no one. Don’t forsake me, don’t leave me alone! John, John!’

‘I must,’ he said, ‘if I am to defend you, to save you, as you say. And then,’ he added, ‘there is more than that: to take care of—him. He cannot be ignored, mother; at least he has claims upon me.’

‘Oh, John! Stay with me, don’t go. It has not been for myself I have feared most, but for you. It was always for you that I have feared, lest he might get an influence, lest he might—— John, stay with me! Have I not the best right to you? I that have——’

‘Distrusted me always, mother. I don’t blame you, but you know it has been so.’

She covered her face with her hands.

‘I am but a feeble, prejudiced woman. I claim no exception. I do wrong trying to do right, like all the rest, John. I feared, God forgive me, that you might turn out—I thought you were——’

‘The son of my father,’ he said, with a mingling of sweetness and bitterness which gave something keen and poignant to the sound of his voice. ‘And so I am—and so I must prove myself now.’

CHAPTER VIII.
THE CONVICT.