CHAPTER XVI.
THE GREAT SCHEME.
AND yet there was something for which the poor young fellow was capable still.
While this strange meeting had gone on, a telegraph boy—that familiar, common-place little sprite of the streets—had made his way to John’s door; and, unnoticed by the agitated group, had been directed by Mrs. Short putting out her head and shaking it sadly all the time by way of protest—to where John stood. This little bit of side action had been going on for a minute or two without anyone observing it; and it was not till the group had broken up and John and his sister were standing together, incapable of speech and almost of thought, watching the others as they walked away, that the telegraph boy came up and thrust his message into John’s hand. It seemed a vulgar interruption, breaking into the tragic scene; and John stood with the envelope in his hand, with a sense that he was as much beyond the reach of any communications which could reach him in that way, as if he had come to himself in the land beyond the grave. But Susie felt differently; the interruption was to her a welcome break.
‘Look at it,’ she said, holding his arm close with a woman’s keen interest in a new event. ‘It may be something of importance.’
‘There is nothing of any importance,’ he said, in the deadly languor of exhaustion. ‘Nothing can make any difference to us now.’
‘But open it,’ said Susie.
He gave her a look of reproach. What did it matter? If the telegram had been from the Queen, it could have made no difference. Nothing could alter the fact that he was his father’s son.
‘But open it,’ Susie said again.
He tore it open in a languid way, hoping nothing, caring for nothing, in the blank of despondency and helplessness. Even the words within did not rouse him. He read and crumpled it up in his hand.
‘What is it, John?’
‘Nothing very much. They want me—in the office,’ he said.
‘In the office! That makes me think—John, why are you here at this time of day?’
‘If you mean why am I not there—— I haven’t been there for three days. I have left the office,’ said John, in the carelessness of his exhausted state.
She caught his arm again with an almost shriek of dismay.
‘Left the office! when it is all you have to look to. Oh, John, John!’
‘What did it matter? They were very unjust: they made a false accusation: and then I discovered him. I found out why they suspected me, why I have been suspected all my life—even by you and—my mother, Susie.’
‘Oh, no, John. Oh, no, no, dear John. Never, never!’ cried Susie, vehemently. ‘Mother has suffered a great deal: she can’t forget: she can’t forgive even as we do. We do, John, don’t we? We do, we do!’
‘Forgive whom? The people that had always doubted me for a reason I didn’t even know?’
His face grew stern. He could say nothing of the other, whom it was both easier and harder to forgive. Susie did not dare to enter upon that subject. She gave his arm a little pressure, and said, softly,
‘Since they send for you, you will go, John? Oh, go! You must not throw everything away, because——’
‘Because—it does not matter to anybody, least of all to me. I’ll go away to America, or somewhere, and take that poor wretch, that light-hearted wretch——’
‘Oh, John, he is your father.’
‘I know: can you say anything worse? are you trying what is the hardest thing you can say?’
‘Oh, John!’ said poor Susie, and began to cry.
Her confusion, and trouble, and anxiety, not unmixed with a little exasperation, too, were not to be expressed in any other way.
He relented a little at the sight of her tears.
‘I think there’s no heart left in me,’ he said. ‘I make everybody that cares for me unhappy. You, out here in the street, and there, inside—Elly.’
‘Elly!’
Susie’s astonishment was so great that she could not find another word to say.
‘She does not cry,’ said poor John. ‘She has come to stand by us. She is braver than I am. She’s so innocent, Susie, she doesn’t know. If she knew better, if she knew the world, she wouldn’t come to me, a poor, shamed, and ruined man, a convict’s son.’
‘Oh, John!’ There being no answer to make to this, Susie recurred to the former subject. He had still the telegram crushed in his hand. ‘That is not about ruin and shame,’ she said. ‘John, tell me, what does it say?’
‘I scarcely know what it says,’ he answered, with an impatient sigh. And then suddenly, in a moment, by some strange miracle of the nerves and brain, he seemed to see the message glow out in big letters of flame quivering through the air, obliterating the shabby walls and long lines of the pavement, throwing a strange light upon everything—till they got inside his very soul, and obliterated everything else that was there. Words which were not divine, nor even very elevated that they should have moved him so. ‘Scheme very promising, your presence indispensable.’ What did that mean? He knew very well what it meant—that all was not over, as he thought, that life and hope still remained. What did he care about such empty, impotent things? But so it was. All was not over, though he insisted within himself that it was so. The story of May and his little boy might, after all, be but a fairy-tale that had no sequence or meaning. And he was John Sandford, and the ball was at his foot once more.
John scarcely knew how he got to the office on that eventful morning; but somehow, by force or sweet persuasion, or something that drew him in spite of himself, he went, leaving the ladies still in his parlour, where, in the sickness of his heart, he could not see them again. The sight of Elly was more than he could bear. It was easier to face the Barretts, and anything they could say to him, than to look at Elly in her ignorance and certainty, in her all-confident love and courage. She to stand by him! who would not be permitted to soil her gentle name and stainless record by the most distant contact with his shame and wretchedness. Elly! her very name gave him a sick pang of mingled sweetness and misery. To think she should be ready to do all that for him—and to think that in honour and justice he ought never to see her again!
He found the Barretts, father and son, awaiting him with apparent anxiety. They both looked up eagerly when he opened the door, and Mr. William came forward, holding out his hand.
‘Sit down, Sandford. My father and I wish to have a little talk with you. We are all sorry for the misunderstanding that occurred when you were here last.’
‘I don’t think there was any misunderstanding. Mr. Barrett told me that I was doing what he always expected, when I behaved like a traitor and liar.’
‘It was all a mistake, Sandford. I give you my word it was all a mistake. Father, you had better speak for yourself.’
‘I withdraw what I said, if I said that,’ said the old gentleman. ‘Perhaps I have been prejudiced. My opinion is that children are what their parents make them: but circumstances alter cases. And I hear from William——’
‘The fact is,’ said the junior partner, laying his hand upon the papers on the table, ‘that this is a most remarkable scheme of yours, Sandford.’
In whatsoever depths a man may be, to have his work or his invention praised will make his heart jump. Suddenly it seemed to John as if a great cloud, which had enveloped the world, opened and rolled aside, and out from behind it, in all the splendour of day, appeared for a moment the smiling blue. He thought that cloud and darkness had been the shadow of his father; but that it was not this alone was evident suddenly now—if only for a moment. He did not say anything in reply, but drew a long breath.
‘Spender & Diggs,’ continued Mr. William Barrett, ‘like idiots as they are, tell Prince that they can’t make head or tale of it: that it’s mixed up with clever things and nonsense; and that they have sent it back.’
‘The man,’ said John, with a stammering in his voice which his late masters thought was due to some sense of delinquency; ‘the man who copied my papers, and who took them without my knowledge, went for them yesterday and demanded them back.’
‘Ah, that explains—! Well, Sandford, most likely we were wrong altogether. I find a great deal that is admirable in your scheme. We see business in it,’ said Mr. William, rubbing his hands. ‘We see money in it. We see our way to making a great thing of it; that’s the fact, Sandford. We never meant you to take our remonstrance as bitterly as you did, you know: never. Things looked bad. It looked like an ugly piece of business—it looked like——’
‘Put it in plain words,’ said John, roused to all his old indignation, and using involuntarily the words his navvies might have used. ‘You thought it as mean a dirty trick as ever was played?’
Mr. William Barrett paused a little and then he burst into a laugh which carried off a good deal of annoyance and something like shame.
‘We needn’t quarrel about words,’ he said, ‘but I never believed it in my heart. I looked for some explanation from you that would clear it up at once, for I knew you were not the man to do a dirty trick. But I could get nothing out of you, not even when I went to your rooms that time, and found you involved deeper and deeper.’
‘When did you come to my rooms?’ said John, looking at him blankly.
‘Sandford,’ said the younger Barrett, ‘look here, my good fellow, you’re young and you must be careful. Whatever you have been doing, it must have been worse than an ordinary spree.’
John stared at him for a moment without comprehending: and then he answered; with a kind of smile,
‘Yes, it was much worse than an ordinary—spree.’
‘If it were not that I never knew you to do anything of the kind before—— Yes, I was there; you had two men with you, and I didn’t like the looks of them. Now, look here: I didn’t understand then, and I don’t inquire now, what was the matter; you’ve always been a steady fellow so far as we have known; you’ll have to be so more than ever, mind you, if you go into this big thing. The thing’s so big that it will make your fortune—with the help our experience can give you—and if it’s accepted, as I have little doubt it will be. But you’ll have to be careful. Bad company and bad hours, and that sort of thing, will never do for a rising man.’
John made no reply. Bad company! yes, it had been bad company. It was hard to sit quietly under an imputation which went so entirely against all the traditions of his life, but it was better perhaps that they should think so than that they or anyone should know the truth.
The elder Mr. Barrett shook his solemn head like a wise old sheep, with his white hair and beard.
‘Depend upon it,’ he said, ‘without good principles, no man ever did anything. Clever notions are all very well, but without good principles——’
‘It’s well to have the notions and the principle too,’ said the junior partner, interrupting hastily. ‘Here are some jottings I have put on paper, Sandford. You can run your eye over them. That’s what, in case your plan should be accepted, we would propose. You had better think it well over and consult your friends: and in the meantime make use of any assistance you want in the office to put it all in right form. If you will take my advice, you will lose no time.’
John looked over the paper put into his hand with a dimness in his eye and a throbbing in his head, as if all the machinery that would be wanted in the work had suddenly been set going in his brain. It clanged, and whirred, and rang as if all the great wheels were going and the pistons falling, and every motive power in action; and then there suddenly rolled out before him like a panorama the future life which he had planned and hoped, the great works in which his mind should be the directing force, and all the industries that depended thereupon. It was not, perhaps, what the youthful dreamer would ordinarily think a romantic picture. He seemed to see all the great workshops, the men in the foundries in the glare of their red furnaces, the brickworks, the regiments of excavators on the soil, a whole busy world of men, with plenty and prosperity around them. He saw all this in one lightning flash. This was what had set his imagination soberly aflame when he was a boy. This was the lighthouse that Elly had shaped among the boundless possibilities of life in Mr. Cattley’s study. Elly! Ah! that drove away his dream in a moment, and brought him back to himself, standing in a great confusion of being in Mr. Barrett’s office, studying the paper—the paper which was only half visible to him, which made fortune and favour sure.
‘I’ll take to-day,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I can settle to anything to-day.’
They shook hands with him, even the old sheep, looking out with his white locks with an immovable face still distrustful of John, yet compelled to that complaisance; and he went out with that in his pocket—that which proved his early dreams to be real, which was the test and touchstone of his value in the eyes of those who had been his masters, and were best able to judge. He went out, forgetting everything else that had happened, taking up for the moment his life where he had dropped it a week before. A week ago he would have taken that paper to the family at the rectory, and the humbleness of his origin—his origin, which was so respectable, yet not on the level of the Spencers—would have been forgotten. Again for one moment more the elation of his success got into John’s brain. Again he trod on air. He thought, his brain all dizzy with the sudden rapture, of showing it all to Elly, making her understand. She would not understand, but she would think she did, in her heart, if not in her brain, and would jump to the delight of it, and all that would follow. They would say to each other that this was the lighthouse, the first idea that had struck their youthful fancy, Elly’s lighthouse, which had caught John’s imagination in its earliest dawning, and flashed at last into this great thing.
The young man in his misery had a revelation, a vision of overpowering sweetness and delight. Without that spark of divine light from her, he said to himself, it would never have been, this great work, which he knew would bring comfort and well-being over a whole district, and make his name famous, and bring many a blessing: his name; but they should know, everybody should know that by himself he never would have thought of it, that it was Elly who had been the first. How could he let the world know that it was Elly who was the first—not, indeed, to think of the Thames Valley and its drainage, or how to make an end of the floods, she who could not, God bless her, manage her algebra even, or work out a problem to save her life—but only to light up the thoughts that were good for that sort of thing, to light the first divine beacon of which all lighthouses were only the development? He was very young in spite of all his maturity and experience; and for one blissful moment, nay hour, this elation and rapture took possession of his soul, and made him forget the horrible passage through which he had gone, and all the bitter realities around him. He floated once more into a world of light and brightness, and boundless hope and enthusiasm. All the more heavenly, for the depth of despair in which he had been dwelling, was the glory of this, the confidence, the anticipation of everything that was best both in work and in life, the happiness of carrying it all out, the delight of talking it over with Elly, explaining it all to her day by day. She would not understand, not a bit, he said to himself, with tears of pleasure in his eyes; but it would come to the same thing: for she would understand him and what he wanted, and it would be her work as well as his—Elly’s lighthouse, of which the foundations were laid in Mr. Cattley’s study long ago.
When suddenly, in the midst of all these delightful thoughts, John felt himself struck down as if by a great stone, as if it were some falling meteor, compounded of infernal elements, though coming from the skies. It came down, down with the straight and cruel velocity which is given by natural laws, down to the very bottom of his heart. Suddenly there seemed to appear before him old Barrett shaking his head, and his own mother, with her suspicious, troubled eyes, watching him, looking for evil: and the reason of it all. The convict’s son! with the whole world watching to see when the leaven would break out in him, his father’s nature, the instincts of the criminal—and even his friends standing apart in horror and pity, broken-hearted, yet holding his shame aloof. What could they do but hold him aloof? And Elly, Elly, who wanted to stand by him, who had come to give him her support, to be his champion, his stainless white protector! He heard himself laugh in the street like a madman, laugh aloud with misery, he who had been nearly weeping with pleasure. God help him, for what could man do for him; or woman either, or fool, or angel—for was not she all these together, she who could dream of the possibility of standing up for him still, standing by him, and he his father’s son?