CHAPTER XI.
MRS. BARTON’S LITTLE BILL.
THERE are different ways of being penniless, as we have said. The man who does his work from day to day may have nothing, and yet be easy enough; and the man who has wealth or expectations behind him may treat a momentary impecuniosity as a good joke. And most people, too, find it easy enough to be largely in debt. A big balance against him in some big tradesman’s books seldom, unless he comes to the point of desperation, is very deeply afflictive to a young man; but your little, greasy, weekly bill,—handed in by your poor, greasy, termagant landlady, with hungry, or wistful, or furious eyes,—and not a penny in your pocket to pay it,—this is, indeed, to look poverty in the face.
And this is what happened to Ben Renton the day he took leave of Millicent. If it had been a snake in his path he could not have looked at the poor little crumpled envelope on his table with greater horror. He had been nearly penniless, it is true, for the six months which he had spent in Guildford Street, as has been related, but he had never been troubled about his weekly bill; and he had nothing, nor any prospect of anything, for three months. And he could not dig, and to beg was ashamed. All the horrors of his position flashed upon him as he stood and gazed at it. His occupation was gone,—his enchantress was leaving him,—everything was over and ended. And he had no money, and nothing to do now that the delirium was over. With his pulses all tingling from the last meeting, and the strange intoxication of mingled content and despair in his brain, to plunge into this cold sea of reality, was something terrible. He caught his breath and shivered like a man near drowning. Then he sat down and took out his purse, and counted over the money in it. There were a few shillings left, and one sovereign,—the last of its race; and that was all he should have for three months,—he, Benedict Renton, the representative of an old wealthy house,—he who imagined himself Millicent Tracy’s betrothed. He was going to make wealth and a fortune for her, and this was the foundation he had to start upon. And how to dig he knew not, nor to what to apply himself.
Then Ben seized his hat and went out, leaving the thunderbolt which had thus shaken him,—Mrs. Barton’s little bill,—lying on the table. He had no need to look at it. Its crooked column of shillings was quite as appalling to him as if it had been hundreds of pounds, for he had not a penny, so to speak. He had some five-and-twenty shillings in the world; and when a man has come to that, the mere amount of what he owes does not much matter to him. Small or great, it involved the same impossibility,—he had nothing wherewith to pay it. The evening had come on,—a May evening,—with a little fresh wind blowing, and a scent of growing grass and fresh foliage even in the dingiest of squares. London had revolved upon its axis since he had gone to Guildford Street. Even in that sombre neighbourhood the thrill of the new season was in everybody’s veins; the tall dark houses round the corner, which had slumbered all winter, had now lights gleaming all over them. The old fly with the white horse, and the driver in white cotton gloves, which Ben had caught a vision of through the window the first time he entered that house and met his fate, drove past him now as he went out, with a semblance of dash and spirit, conveying ladies in full dress to some dinner-party. Six months,—and had he been slumbering, too, and had dreams?—or taking the most important step of his life, laying a sweet foundation for after happiness?—or throwing away so much time, and his peace into the bargain? Heaven knows! He went out and made his way through the twilight streets into the Park, where the dew was falling and the stars shining. Even yet he had not come to ask himself seriously the question, What was he to do? His mind was in a haze of excitement, and uncertainty, and passion. It was like the evening landscape amidst which he went abroad,—lights gleaming about all its edges,—vague noises,—a haze about that blurred the distant outlines,—calm with the compulsory quiet which comes with an ending, whatever that ending may be,—yet agitated with fears and hopes and uncertain resolutions. There was the faint fragrance of the spring, and the soft sadness of the night, and the mystery of that indistinct hum and roar of the great city, so near yet so unseen! All this was round about Ben as he walked, and it was but a shadow of the commotion, the silence, the despair and excitement, that were in his heart.
He walked up and down so long, having the whole soft world of space and darkness to himself, as it seemed, that positive fatigue stole over him at last; and then he turned instinctively, almost without knowing; it, to the familiar ways from which he had long been a comparative exile. When he found himself in the lighted street, pursuing the way to his club, Ben had become languid and listless, and was scarcely conscious of any stronger feeling than weariness. It was past eight o’clock, and in his exhaustion he remembered that he had not dined. For some time past, since the stream of life had begun to pour back to town, he had avoided the club, not wishing to meet former friends; but he was weary and stupefied, and did not seem to care for anything that night. He went in and ordered himself a spare dinner, and sat down under cover of a newspaper, entrenching himself behind the vast sheet of the ‘Times’ to wait for it. Ben Renton, once amongst the most distinguished, the wealthiest, hope-fullest, best-known of all the community,—and that only six months ago,—now with five-and-twenty shillings in his pocket, his life as uncertain as that of any adventurer, poorer than any day-labourer who knew where to get work for the morrow, waiting for his cutlet, concealed behind a newspaper! Could any imagination conceive so vast a change?
As he rose to go to his meal, however, Ben discovered that he had not been hid. Friends came up to greet him whom it was not easy to shake off; and when at last he got to the door of the room in which he had been sitting, a danger which he had not apprehended befell him. His name was called out with a positive shout that roused everybody’s attention, and, before he could get out of the way, he was caught, and all but hugged, by his mother’s brother,—a hobbling, gouty old sea-captain, who was the last man in the world he wished to see. ‘What, Ben Renton! God bless us, come to the surface at last!’ Captain Ormerod cried loudly, as he posted down to meet his nephew, making such a clatter with his stick and his lame foot as roused everybody. Such an encounter at such a moment was terrible to Ben; but he had to swallow his impatience, and to brave it as he best could.
‘Going to get some dinner? I’ll go with ye, my boy,’ said his uncle. ‘Why, I’ve been to the Manor, and seen them all except yourself, Ben; and there is as much lamentation over ye as if ye had gone down at sea. Why don’t ye go and see your mother, boy? My poor fellow!’ the sailor continued, as they sat down together at the table where poor Ben’s dinner was served to him, ‘I don’t much wonder. If the old boy had played me such a trick when I was your age——’
‘Remember it is my father you are speaking of,’ said Ben, hastily, his pride and his affection all in arms. Home and its associations had been as things before the deluge to him ten minutes ago. How they rushed back upon him now at the very sound of this old man’s voice! His father,—ah, yes, his father, had been very hard upon him; but, still, was not to be breathed against by any living man save himself.
‘Well said, Ben,’ said his uncle; ‘well said, my boy! I like that. To be sure he was your father, and my poor sister’s husband. But I may say I wish he had made a will like other people. Why, you might have been enjoying your own, a fine young Squire, among the best of them, if some one had not put such devilish nonsense in his head.’
As the sailor spoke, the phantasmagoria of those six months rolled away, as it were, from Ben’s eyes. A vision of what he might have been rose before him. A man, important to so many people, with power and influence in his hands, with a voice perhaps in the ruling of his country, with all kinds of private interests at least to take charge of, dependants to protect, friends to support and assist; and instead he had spent his time in the little parlour at Guildford Street, madly possessed with one woman’s image, dead and useless to every creature in the world. Was this his father’s fault?
‘I’d rather not think on the subject,’ he said. ‘My father, no doubt, meant well by us. He meant to teach us to depend on ourselves, to rouse our energies——’
‘Well, my dear fellow, well,’ said Captain Ormerod, with an impatient sigh, ‘I hope he has done so, that’s all. I should have said you looked more as if you had been asleep and dreaming than anything else. And it was not your poor mother’s fault, you may be sure, whoever was to blame. You might have written home.’
‘I should,’ said Ben, with compunction. ‘I will write at once. I am very sorry. How is my mother?’ his voice faltered in spite of himself as he named her. He had not so much as remembered he had a mother in the absorption of his passion. He almost thought he could see her now on her sofa smiling at him. Poor weakly woman! Not of sufficient mark in the world to be remembered even by her son; but yet giving the lie very distinctly, now he came to think of it, to his bitter identification of Mrs. Tracy as the type of mothers. It seemed strange to him to be able to recollect so clearly, all in a moment, that he had a mother of his own.
‘That’s right, my boy,’ said the Captain; ‘and now tell me what you have been doing with yourself all this time.’
‘Nothing!’ said Ben. He had been hungry, and weary, and faint, and wanted his dinner, poor fellow! but the question took away his appetite. He pushed his plate away from him as he answered it. Nothing, and yet how much! But he could not betray what his occupation had been to this old man, who had outlived such folly, and, at the best, would have laughed at the young fellow’s idiocy. He felt his colour rise, however, in spite of himself, and in his heart called himself a fool.
‘Nothing! Well, I am not surprised,’ said his uncle. ‘They all feel, my dear fellow, that it has been most hard upon you. Laurie has been working, they tell me, in his way; and Frank is taking to his profession with all his heart. Frank, you know, is my boy, Ben. But, my dear fellow, notwithstanding your respect for your father, and all that, which is very creditable to you, I’d rather question the will, and get it set aside, if possible, than let myself fall into this sort of way, you know.’
‘What sort of way?’ said Ben; and then an odd, painful curiosity came over him. He seemed to have fallen out of acquaintance with himself in his old character, and was not quite sure what kind of a being he was now. ‘You don’t think that I have improved after six months’ sulking?’ he said, with a forced smile.
‘If you ask me honestly I must say, no,’ said the Captain. ‘I don’t think you have. I don’t make you out, Ben. You haven’t taken to—— drink, or anything of that kind? That’s poor consolation. My dear fellow, I beg your pardon. One does not know what to suppose.’
‘No; I have not taken to drink,’ said Ben, trying to laugh; but his lip quivered in spite of himself. When he tried a second time he succeeded, but the laugh was harsh. ‘I have been living on my income,’ he said.
Captain Ormerod shook his head. ‘I am very sorry for you, my boy,’ he said; ‘but I hoped you would have taken it better than this. Your mother was very much upset about your silence; but I persuaded her you were not the fellow to sulk, as you say; and Laurie and Frank have really borne it so well.’
‘Don’t speak to me of Laurie and Frank!’ cried Ben, stung beyond bearing. ‘What difference does it make to them? Frank is a boy, and a soldier, with his profession to fall back on; and Laurie is a fellow that would always have mooned his life away; whereas I——’
‘Well, if you talk of mooning,’ said the Captain, sadly; and then he paused. ‘Couldn’t we do something among us, Ben? We ought to have some influence at least. If you had only been a seaman now, one might have managed somehow; but of course there’s heaps of things. Why, there’s all those public offices,’ said the sailor, getting up from his chair, with a little excitement, and waving his hand in the direction of Whitehall and Downing Street; ‘and very good berths, I believe, in some of them. ‘Why can’t we get you something there?’
‘It’s too late, uncle,’ said Ben, gradually waking into rationality as the old life came back and grew familiar to him. He was able even to give a softened momentary laugh at the futility of the proposition. ‘Don’t you know there’s nothing but merit and examinations now-a-days for every office under the sun?’
‘Well,’ said Captain Ormerod, pleased to feel that he had brought the wanderer back to a more natural tone, ‘I don’t see why that should frighten you. I have always heard you had a fine education, Ben.’
Ben laughed again, more softened still, and with moisture creeping into the corners of his eyes. ‘I am too old to go to school again,’ he said. ‘A man has to be shut up and crammed like a turkey before he can go in for that sort of thing. One has to be brought up to it. I am afraid that would not do.’
‘Then why don’t you go to India?’ cried his uncle;—‘or somewhere. You don’t mean to tell me there are no fortunes to be made in the world, when a young fellow has the spirit to try?’
Ben made no answer. What could he say? A sudden sickness of heart came over him. She was going away to-morrow morning. Mrs. Barton’s bill was lying on his table. He had five-and-twenty shillings in his pocket, and despair in his heart. And to be called upon to answer all in a moment, as if it was a thing that could be settled out of hand, how he would choose to go and make his fortune! In his impatience he leaned his head on his two hands, almost hiding his face between them, and turned half away.
‘Or else dispute the will,’ said the trenchant old sailor. ‘Obeying your parents is one thing, and sacrificing yourself to a piece of nonsense is another. Your poor father’s mind must have been touched—it must have been——’
‘My father had a right to dispose of what was his own,’ said Ben, haughtily; and then he broke down a little. ‘Forgive me, uncle. I am dreadfully tired to-night, and down on my luck. We could not touch my father’s will if even I would consent to try. I’ll talk it all over with you another day.’
The old captain gave the young man a compassionate look as he sat thus huddled up, hiding his face in his hands, and made that curious little sound with his tongue against the roof of his mouth which is one of the primitive signs of distress and perplexity. Then he hobbled off into a corner and pulled out a pocket-book from his pocket and examined its contents. ‘A little money can’t do him any harm,’ he said to himself. And as it happened, by a lucky chance for Ben, there were two notes, a ten-pound and a five, among the papers in that receptacle. The Captain made a bundle of them, folding them up with his gouty, lumpy fingers, which trembled a little, and came back and thrust it into his nephew’s hand. ‘You’re not too old yet for a tip, though you’re wiser than your elders,’ he said. ‘God bless you, my dear boy! Come and see me as soon as you can.’
And thus deliverance, utterly unlocked for, came to Ben Renton in his downfall. Such a tiny, little deliverance out of such a paltry ruin as Mrs. Barton’s bill might have brought him to! But if the bill had been thousands, and this treasure a million, it could not have been more emphatically a deliverance. He would have avoided the club altogether could he have supposed his uncle to be there; indeed, nothing but sheer weariness could have carried him into it at such a moment. And yet the chance had saved him. Saved him! Only a ten and a five-pound note; but at this moment to Ben it was salvation, neither less nor more. How curiously words differ in their meaning from one day to another in a man’s life!
He sat there a long time after in one of those lulls which follow great excitement, sipping his sherry, which, though he had eaten no dinner, gave a certain soothing to his outward man, and looking as if he were in very deep thought. But naturally, poor fellow! he was not thinking, nor capable of thinking. Heaps of things were flitting before him in a kind of fantastic procession. The home, which seemed so far away; the mother whom he had almost forgotten; the life,—had it ever been, or had he but dreamed it?—which he had lived a year ago. Was it he, Ben Renton, whom Captain Ormerod’s fifteen pounds had just saved from bankruptcy, who lived in the Albany once, and was the heir of Renton Manor, and one of the most popular men in society? or was it but a tale he had read somewhere in a book? His weariness lent another shade of confusion to the picture. And now and then these dim thoughts were traversed by one so sharp, so clear, so acute, that it chased all the mists away. She was going to-morrow. He had said his farewell to her. Her hand had been in those hands of his, on which he looked down with a sudden thrill. Her lips had consented, or at least assented, with that passive softness of the unimpassioned woman, which drove him wild, yet held him fast, to wait for him. Was it to wait for him? or was it only to let him come when his fortune was made to try his chance again? What did it matter which? One form of folly or the other would have been much the same to Millicent, in her strange, compassionate, worldly-minded conviction that he would never make his fortune, or, if he did, would change his mind;—and in the confidence of his love and passion would have been the same to Ben.
Thus when the witch had routed once more all the softening charm of old association, he sat till there was nobody but himself in the dining-room. He had so much the air of a man who had no mind to be interrupted, that several of his old friends had felt themselves suppressed by a nod, and had gone without speaking to him. And even that unpleasant suggestion which had occurred to the Captain about the habits of the impoverished man came into the heads of two or three who saw him sitting with that absorbed look over his sherry. Could he have taken in his downfall to the meanest of all consolations? The thought troubled some friendly souls; but perhaps it helped to keep him quite undisturbed in the solitude he wished. It was getting quite late when some one rushed in with his hands full of papers, disturbing the quiet of the place—some one who demanded coffee—and threw himself down in a chair at the other end of the room; and then got up and began to walk about, filling the languid air with a certain commotion, a sound of rustling papers, and vibration of busy thought. This intruder caught sight of Ben after he had been about ten minutes in the room, and catching up his documents, whatever they were, made a rush at his table. ‘The very man I wanted!’ he cried. ‘Ben Renton! I thought you were dead, or mad, or at the other end of the world.’
‘And I am neither, as you perceive,’ said Ben, not well pleased with the encounter. There was no man in the world he less cared to see at this particular time.
‘I have not seen you for ages,’ said Hillyard. ‘Mind, I don’t want to intrude myself if I’m a bore. You have only to say so. But unless you’ve had more luck than most men, I have something that may be of use to you here.’ And he put down his rustling burden on the table, and swallowed his coffee with a kind of impatient eagerness. ‘I’d rather have had something more cheering,’ he said, with a laugh; ‘but a man must have his wits clear when he has business in hand. You don’t answer my question, Ben.’
‘If I am in luck!’ said Ben. Already he had suppressed the inclination to impatience with which he had been disposed to answer his old acquaintance. Surely this was not a moment to repel any offer of aid. ‘I am just as you saw me six months ago, which does not come to much.’
‘Doing nothing?’ said Hillyard, eagerly.
‘Then, by Jove, I’ll make your fortune, my boy!’ cried the adventurer, striking the table with his hand in his excitement. ‘I’m going out to America next week to make a railway. Didn’t you know I was an engineer? That before everything;—in a secondary way, traveller, sheep-farmer, colonial agent, litterateur,—anything you please, but engineer first of all. And I’ve got a railway in America to make, and I want a man to help me. Ben, don’t say another word. If you like you shall be the man.’
Then there was a pause, and Hillyard plunged into the midst of his papers, from which he drew an unintelligible drawing, diversified with dabs of colour and dotted lines. Ben said not a word while the search was going on. A strange sensation, half fear, half hope, seemed to go through his veins. It was the first offer of work that had ever been made to him,—from Hillyard, of all men, who had taken him to Guildford Street and actually made Millicent known to him,—whom he had kept clear of since as a vulgar adventurer, not able to estimate such a heavenly creature but in his own coarse way. And now it was he who offered him the first round, perhaps, of the ladder by which he should reach her! With this there mingled a doubt of the reality of Hillyard’s good fortune. An adventurer himself, what solid help could he have to offer to others? All these mingled thoughts rushed through Ben’s mind while his companion was finding the plan. When he had spread it out on the table, Ben gave an unsteady, nervous laugh, glancing at it without an idea what it could mean.
‘I know nothing of railways,’ he said, ‘except travelling on them. I don’t know even the meaning of the words on the margin there. How could I be of any use to you,—unless as a navvy?’ he added, holding out his arm; ‘and it would be easy to find a finer development of muscle than mine.’
‘Pshaw!’ said Hillyard, ‘it is no joke. I mean what I say. You may trust to me to find you what you can do. The only question is, Will you do it? Do you want work? or is it only a makebelief about Renton and all that? How can I tell? You bury yourself out of the world, and never throw yourself in the way of anything, so far as one can see. You may be contenting yourself with what you have. You may be above taking a share of one’s good fortune. I say again, how can I tell?’
‘I am ready to work at anything. It is the height of my wishes,’ said Ben, with a huskiness in his voice. Further explanation he could make none; but his heart smote him all the same. What right had he to a share of any one’s good fortune,—and of this man’s above all, for whom he had never done anything? He had not even the gratification of thinking that he had been kind to him in his wealthier days.
‘Then look here,’ said Hillyard, plunging into his work.
The two sat with their heads together over the inarticulate drawing till long past midnight. By degrees it became intelligible to the novice. Shortly it opened up before him into a possibility,—a thing practicable, a new hope. When he went back to Guildford Street in the early morning,—the morning which was still night,—his head was full of the new idea. He was no longer an aimless, half-desperate man, detached from everything but the one absorbing madness which had taken possession of his empty life; he had linked himself on again to fact and nature, recovered his identity, his independence, himself. The change that lay before him,—palpable, visible, unmistakable change from one hemisphere to another, from doing nothing to hard, open-air, undisguisable work,—had dispersed already the mists which made a mystery and vision of all former changes. He stretched out his hands to the past, even as he lifted them to the future. It was but this unwholesome, unreal interval which had made life itself look as a dream and a thing untrue.