AFTER this there ensues a gap in John’s life:—no real gap, indeed, but a steady, quiet continuance of work and training of which the record might be interesting enough to those who are pursuing the same path, but not perhaps to anyone else. He was transferred to lodgings nearer his work, almost without any will of his own, his mother acting for him with a steady authority against which he chafed, but which it was impossible to resist. The lodgings might have been the same as those from which he was transferred, a little parlour, a little bed-room, a red and blue cover on the table, a horse-hair sofa, the same features were in both. And here John settled down. He knew nobody to lead him into the ordinary haunts of young men in London; and perhaps the fixed prepossession against him that he was sure to like what was wrong, had as strong an influence as the fixed certainty that nothing but right and honest things could come from him, which does so much for some favourites of nature. Human nature is very contradictory, and no two specimens can be guided in the same way. His mother’s stern observation of every possible indication of weakness, and Susie’s wistful watch, enlisted perhaps the evil as well as the good of John’s nature in the cause of virtue. His temper, and that perversity which is more or less in every natural character, rose in arms against the imputation that was upon him. He said to himself that, whatever happened, their prognostics should not be permitted to be right: and thus aided, so to speak, by his demons as well as by his angels, with his head held high against all the solicitations of the lower nature which would have proved that injurious foregone conclusion to be a just one, he made his way through the loneliness of those early years—going back evening after evening to spend the dull hours in his little sitting-room, with a determination which virtue alone might not have been equal to, without the aid of those forces of pride, and opposition, and resistance to injustice.
This austere self-restraint told upon his work, as it always does. Temperance and purity give wings to the mind, as they give force to the body. He read in self-defence, to quench all youthful longings after gaiety and brightness, and when he had exhausted poetry and fiction, which naturally he felt to be the best indemnifications and solaces for his loneliness, he began to read for work and for ambition, and soon found in those books that dealt either directly or indirectly with his profession, an interest more ardent, more exciting, than even that of story. From seventeen to twenty-one, a youth, with this inclination for work and few distractions, can get through an enormous amount of reading: and John’s mind gradually filled with stores such as no student need have been ashamed of. They were not perhaps so classical as they might have been had he gone to the University, but, in all probability, even in that respect they were fully as extensive as they would have been had John without the stimulus of his resolution and his solitude ‘gone up’ with Dick and Percy Spencer into the midst of the noisy young life of their college. He would not have resisted these cheerful influences; he would have done what the others did, and read as little as was necessary. But in the unlovely quiet of his little parlour in a little London street, with pride and angry self-defence keeping his door, along with more celestial guardians, he read with enthusiasm, with passion: and as his books, after the first juvenile frenzy for the lovelier and lighter portions of literature, were practical and serious, engaged with the present rather than the past, he became by degrees a mine of information, thoroughly equipped for all the chances of his work, and every region that these might lead him to. He read travels and books upon new and little known countries with devotion. He studied every scheme for the new development of the untrodden portions of the earth. He had the stories of all great industrial undertakings at his fingers’ end. In short, John got to know so very much more than the narrator of his story, that I give up the attempt to follow him, simply adding that though it had been done rather with the intention of making that austere life possible, than from any other reason, it had the most admirable effects both on his mind and his work. Such stores are like the miraculous gifts of the Gospel, they cannot be hid. It soon became apparent, both to those who were over him and to his fellow-pupils, that for the settling of a disputed question, or for the geography of any new piece of work undertaken by the firm, or for those most essential questions about native workmen and local government which tell so much on enterprises like theirs, there was no such referee as John. He was sent for before Messrs. Barrett would settle about that railway in Hungary. He was consulted as to the South American business, which eventually, young Sandford’s knowledge having been overborne by the apparent advantage of the undertaking, was a source of so much trouble to the firm. And, by the time he was twenty-one, John was recognised by everybody as the most valuable of all the young men trained in the office. He had already been sent ‘abroad,’ a word which means anything from Calais to Africa, several times. He had been in America. He was altogether an accomplished and fully-trained engineer, capable to tackle even the lighthouses of Elly’s fancy, but perhaps not so earnest about lighthouses as, under Elly’s inspiration, he had been in his seventeenth year.
All this time his correspondence with Elly had never dropped: but it had become intermittent. They had not met during these years which tell for so much in a young man’s life, and probably even tell for more in the experience of a girl. How she had grown up, or whether she had grown up at all, was a question which John did not discuss with himself. He was very fond of Elly, no one had ever taken her place in his mind. He still thought of her under the pear-tree with her algebra, as if during all this time there had been no further development either of herself or her studies. Elly probably formed a clearer apprehension of the changes that had occurred in him: but to John she was still in short frocks, with all that beautiful hair about her shoulders. He thought sometimes of the serious kiss which had passed between them in token of everlasting friendship, of brotherhood and sisterhood, a seal of youthful affection untinged by any of the agitations or uneasy appropriations of love. It had brought a little colour to Elly’s cheek, but none to that of John, who had asked for it so seriously. The thought brought a little stir now, a little pleasurable movement of his blood. A sister, but not like Susie; a friend, but holding a place apart which no other friend could come near. And, to tell the truth, John had not very many friends; his early life had been against it, and those guardian demons of whom we have spoken—demons without discrimination, who kept out good as well as evil. He was friendly with most of the people about him, but he had not many intimates. The place in which Elly lived supreme, and that in which even Dick and Percy were still recognised as ‘the other boys,’ was kept sacred to that early circle which had been the closest and the warmest John had ever known—all the more so from its contrast with what followed, from the severe mother amid all the cares and business of the hospital, and Susie with her wistful, watchful eyes.
He had not paid very much attention to the fact that his birthday was his twenty-first, and that he was attaining his majority, though that is so important a point in the career of many young men. It was not particularly important to John. He had no joyful tenantry to celebrate it; no happy father and mother to wish him joy. He was already in some things much older than his age, experienced by long encounter with the practical, and by the habits of self-dependence which the nature of his occupations had forced upon him. He was rather, if anything, disposed to smile at the importance of twenty-one, not seeing what difference it could make. His little property he had long ceased to think of. At seventeen it had seemed important; at twenty, nothing. What could it matter? It was better, even more just, he thought, that his mother should have it, who was after all the natural heir of her parents: and if it could purchase a little ease, a little relaxation for her, John was not only generously willing, but had a less amiable, half scornful feeling, that to throw it back at her feet was the only thing that he could desire to do. He was astonished accordingly when he went by her invitation on the evening of his birthday to visit his mother, to find her table covered with papers and she herself awaiting his arrival with a number of accounts and note-books.
‘I have to render an account of my stewardship,’ she said, with her usual gravity. He did not always recognise the change in her manner of speaking to him and regarding him, but nevertheless there was a great change.
‘What stewardship?’ he said.
‘I cease to-day to be your guardian, John, and your trustee and manager and everything. My father thought it unnecessary to burden you with any of those things. He had perhaps an excessive confidence in me. I have now to give up my accounts——’
‘I want no accounts,’ he said: ‘I want to hear nothing about it. If I am to be acknowledged a man, that’s enough. I’ve been to my own consciousness a man—and older than most people—long enough.’
‘Yes,’ she said, with a little sigh, ‘you are a man; you have proved yourself one. The softest of mothers (and I know I have never been soft) could not acknowledge that with more gratitude and satisfaction than I.’
‘But a little grudge,’ he said, with a laugh. He was able to laugh now, though never to forget altogether the bitterness of being misjudged. He no longer talked to her with constraint, feeling himself like a child in her presence—but even yet he was never really at his ease with her. ‘With a grudge,’ he said. ‘You would almost rather I had confirmed your bad opinion, and justified you in what you expected.’
‘I can’t hope that you will understand me—in that respect,’ she said, with a little wave of her hand dismissing the subject. If she did not repent of her evil expectations, she was at least a little ashamed of them, and desired no recurrence to the subject. ‘Look here,’ she said, ‘this is an account of all my incomings and outgoings for the last four years.’
‘I don’t want to see them,’ said John. ‘I am sure you have always done what was best for me.’
‘And, for the future, here is the statement of what you have at your disposal. Surely, at least, you will look at that.’
‘Mother,’ said John, ‘if it is anything worth counting, couldn’t you take it, and get a little rest? All this upon your shoulders from year to year, never any ease or repose, must wear you out. Why don’t you give up, and take Susie to see a little of the world—of course I don’t know if there’s enough for that,’ he added, hastily, with momentary confusion.
‘Mother, didn’t I tell you!’ said Susie, a flush of pleasure rising over her face.
‘It was not necessary for anyone to tell me. There never was any want of generosity,’ said Mrs. Sandford, in a sort of aside. And then she added, ‘Thank you, John. It is very good of you to make the offer: but I’m used to the hospital, and I’m not used to rest. I don’t think I should like it. And my father and mother would like you to have the full enjoyment of your own. There is not very much, but it will always be a comfortable addition to what you can make. There is about two hundred a year, everything put together. And I have as much—that is to say, Susie will have as much as soon as she makes up her mind to do anything independent—in the way of marriage or—any other way.’
At this, Susie turned away with another flush of agitation and embarrassment. Susie was now twenty-six, a mature young woman. And perhaps by times there had come across her mind desires such as maturity brings, to adopt some independent career for herself. It was apparent even to John’s eyes, which were not by any means acute in respect to the doings of others, that there had been moments recently in which the idea of marriage had been in consideration between the mother and daughter, but he had never been told anything about it, nor who the suitor was. And there had also been floating ideas in Susie’s head of joining a sisterhood, and thus consecrating herself to the service of the sick, to whom she was now a volunteer and unofficial ministrant. But nothing had come of that any more than the other. She was in a state of mental commotion, awaiting that development which nature craves, and uneasy, feeling herself no longer a girl to be swayed by the natural law of obedience and submission, but old enough to decide and act for herself: save only that she could not decide how to act. Her mother’s words seemed to her a reproach. She turned away; then, coming back again with an effort, laid one hand upon John’s arm and one upon Mrs. Sandford.
‘Mother,’ she said. ‘We’re both honest, both John and me. He can do for himself, and I, so far as I can see, will never be able to make up my mind to do anything for myself. Why won’t you take us at our word, and take grandfather’s money, and, for the first time in your life, rest?’
The three were all very different. John, perhaps, in his confidence of young manhood, and that consciousness of being entirely a satisfactory person, which cannot fail to have a certain influence on a young man’s way of looking both at himself and others, was now the one most like his mother—and yet he was not like her. While Susie, with her soft eyes, her soft manner, her little flutter of indecision, was as unlike as possible in sentiment, though her features were almost identical with those of the self-controlled and serious woman, with so many responsibilities on her head, and so distinct a grasp of them all, whom she was imploring to take up that softer task, to retire, and accept the generosity of her children and repose from her labours. Mrs. Sandford looked the tallest of the three, not indeed in fact, though she was taller for a woman than John was for a man—but certainly in nature, in sentiment, in the impression which her still graceful, slight figure, her head carried high, her general air of authority, gave. She looked from one to another with a smile, in which there was (to Susie) indulgent toleration of miscomprehension, to John, a little indifference to what he might think at all.
‘Circumstances alter everything,’ she said; ‘if I were really an old woman wanting rest I might take it from you. But I am not. I am as able for my work as either of you. I like it, and if you gave me your money you might have to wait a long time before it came back to you. All these things are against Susie’s proposal. And as for John——’
He looked at her with the opposition in his eyes which had never been quenched since the moment they had met at the little station at Edgeley, on the day his grandmother died.
‘What of John?’ he said.
‘Only that nobody at your age can say what chances a few days may bring forth; what occasion there may be for the support of the little fortune he has a right to, however little it may be. Let us leave this subject for something that will interest you more. John, your grandfather’s house has not been sold, though I had thought it better to do so, had the opportunity occurred. But, as it happens, the opportunity has never occurred. It is yours, now, to do what you like with it, and the tenant who has been in it is going away. I have thought that perhaps you would like to go—and see for yourself what is best to be done. You have still friends there: and you have had few holidays—few amusements.’
There was a certain compunction in her voice—but John could not observe what there was in her voice, for the sudden haze of recollection, and all the old images and thoughts that came back and enveloped him in an atmosphere so different from this. The old house so little and peaceful, the old couple by the fire, the garden full of sunshine with the old gardener pottering about, and the old lady with her tender smile, gathering the flowers. It was not that he remembered all these long past and half-forgotten things. They returned to him as if the sphere of living had rolled round, and he had come to the former times once more. How strange out of the matron’s room in this huge London hospital, out of the engineer’s busy surroundings, the office, the plans, the succession of big undertakings and journeys all over the world, to return back in a moment to that tranquil living once again! He was roused from this momentary realisation of the past, by Susie’s soft voice saying, with a wistful tone in it, ‘I should like to go with you, John.’