This fellow might be in's time a great buyer of land, with his
statutes, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries.--_Hamlet._
As Jack expected, it did not take long for his friend Hampstead to show
where the mistake about the three cents lay; and then they sallied forth
for a little stroll on King Street before dinner.
They lived in adjoining chambers in the Tremaine Buildings on King
Street. The rooms had been intended for law offices, and were reached by
a broad flight of stairs leading up from the street below. Here they
were within five minutes' walk of their bank or the club at which they
generally took their meals. Hampstead had first taken these rooms
because they were in a manner so isolated in the throng of the city and
afforded an uncontrolled liberty of ingress and egress to young men
whose hours for retiring to rest were governed by no hard and fast
rules.
A widow named Priest lived somewhere about the top of the building, with
her son, who was known to the young gentlemen as Patsey. Mrs. Priest
made the beds, did the washing, attended to the fires, and was generally
useful. She also cleaned offices, even to the uttermost parts of the
great building, and altogether made a good thing of it; for besides the
remunerations derived in these ways she had her perquisites. For
instance, in the ten years of her careful guardianship of chambers and
offices in the building, she had never bought any coal or wood. She
possessed duplicate keys for each room in her charge, and thus having a
large number of places to pillage she levied on them all, according to
the amount of fuel she could safely carry away from each place without
its being missed. Young men who occupied chambers there never had to
give away or sell old clothes, because they were never found to be in
the way. She asked for them when she wanted to cut them down for Patsey,
because it would not do to have the owners recognize the cloth on him.
The clothes which she annexed as perquisites she sold.
Patsey was accustomed occasionally to go through the wardrobes of the
gentlemen with his mother, while she made the beds in the morning, and
he then chose the garments that most appealed to his artistic taste.
This interesting heir to Mrs. Priest's personal estate also had his
perquisites "unbeknownst to ma." He consumed a surprising amount of
tobacco for one so young, and might frequently be seen parading King
Street on a summer evening enjoying a cigar altogether beyond his years
and income. His clothes bore the pattern of the fashion in vogue three
or four years back; and, despite some changes brought about by the
scissors of Mrs. Priest, the material, which had been the best Toronto
could provide, still retained much of the glory that had captivated King
Street not so very long ago. Having finally declared war against
education in all its recognized branches, he generally took himself off
early in the day, and lounged about the docks, or derived an
indifferently good revenue from the sale of ferry-boat tickets to the
island; and in various other ways did Patsey provide himself with the
luxuries and enjoyments of a regular topsawyer.
In the immediate neighborhood of Mrs. Priest, at an altitude in the
building which has never been exactly ascertained, dwelt Mr. Maurice
Rankin, barrister-at-law and solicitor of the Supreme Court. He resided
in Chambers, No. 173 Tremaine Buildings, King Street, West, Toronto, and
certainly all this looked very legal and satisfactory on the
professional card which he had had printed. But the interior appearance
of the chambers was not calculated to inspire confidence in the
profession of the law as a kind nurse for aspiring merit; and as for
the approach to No. 173, it was so intricate and dark in its last few
flights of stairs, that none but a practiced foot could venture up or
down without a light, even in the day-time. The room occupied by Mr.
Rankin could never have been intended to be used as an office, or
perhaps anything else, and consequently the numbers of the rooms in the
buildings had not been carried up to the extraordinary elevation in
which No. 173 might now be found. Still, it seemed peculiar not to have
the number of one's chambers on one's card, if chambers should be
mentioned thereon, so he found that the rooms numbered below ended at
172, and then conscientiously marked "No. 173" on his own door with a
piece of white chalk. He also carefully printed his name, "Mr. Maurice
Rankin," on the cross-panel and added the letters "Q.C."--just to see
how the whole thing looked and assist ambition; but he hurriedly rubbed
The Q.C. out on hearing Mrs. Priest approach for one of her interminable
conversations from which there was seldom any escape. When Rankin first
came to Tremaine Buildings he lived in one of the lower rooms, now
occupied by Jack Cresswell, and not without some style and
comfort--taking his meals at the club, as our friends now did. His
father, who had been a well-known broker,--a widower--kept his horses,
and brought up his son in luxury. He then failed, after Maurice had
entered the Toronto University, and, unable to endure the break-up of
the results of his life's hard work, he died, leaving Maurice a few
hundred dollars that came to him out of the life-insurance.
It was with a view to economy that our legal friend came to live in the
Tremaine Buildings after leaving the university and articling himself as
a clerk in one of the leading law firms in the city, where he got paid
nothing. The more his little capital dwindled, the harder he worked.
Soon the first set of chambers were relinquished for a higher, cheaper
room, and the meals were taken per contract, by the week, at a cheap
hotel. Then he had to get some clothes, which further reduced the little
fund. So he took "a day's march nearer home," as he called it, and
removed his effects _au quatrieme etage_, and from that _au
cinquieme_--and so on and up. Regular meals at hotels now belonged to
the past. A second-hand coal-oil stove was purchased, together with a
few cheap plates and articles of cutlery; and here Rankin retired, when
hungry, with a bit of steak rolled up in rather unpleasant brown paper;
and after producing part of a loaf and a slab of butter on a plate, he
cooked a trifle of steak about the size of a flat-iron, and caroused.
This he called the feast of independence and the reward of merit.
Among his possessions could be found a wooden bed and bedding--clean,
but not springy--also a small deal table, and an old bureau with both
hind-legs gone. But the bureau stood up bravely when propped against the
wall. These were souvenirs of a transaction with a second-hand dealer.
In winter he set up an old coal-stove which had been abandoned in an
empty room in the building, and this proved of vast service, inasmuch as
the beef-steak and tea could be heated in the stove, thereby saving the
price of coal-oil. It will occur to the eagle-eyed reader that the price
of coal would more than exceed the price of coal-oil. On this point
Rankin did not converse. Although he started out with as high principles
of honor as the son of a stock-broker is expected to have, it must be
confessed that he did not at this time buy his coal. Therefore there was
a palpable economy in the use of the derelict stove--to say nothing of
its necessary warmth. No mention of coal was ever made between Rankin
and Mrs. Priest; but as Maurice rose in the world, intellectually and
residentially, Mrs. Priest saw that his monetary condition was depressed
in an inverse ratio, and being in many ways a well-intentioned woman,
she commenced bringing a pail of coal to his room every morning, which
generally served to keep the fire alight for twenty-four hours in
moderate weather. Maurice at first salved his conscience with the idea
that she was returning the coal she had "borrowed" from him during his
more palmy days. After the first winter, however, when he had suffered a
good deal from cold, his conscience became more elastic and communistic;
and ten o'clock P.M. generally saw him performing a solitary and gloomy
journey to unknown regions with a coal-scuttle in one hand and a wooden
pail in the other. Jack Cresswell had come across this coal-scuttle one
night in a distant corridor. He filled it with somebody else's coal and
came up with it to Rankin's room--his face beaming with enjoyment--and,
entering on tip-toe, whispered mysteriously the word "pickings." Then,
after walking around the room in the stealthy manner of the stage
villain who inspects the premises before "removing" the infant heir, he
dumped the scuttle on the floor and gasped, breathlessly, "A gift!"
Rankin put aside Byles on Bills and arose with dignity: "What say you,
henchman? Pickings? A gift? Ay, truly, a goodly pickings! Filched,
perchance, from the pursy coal-bins of monopoly?"
"Even so," was the reply, given with bated breath; and with his finger
to his lips, to imply that he was on a criminal adventure, Jack again
inspected the premises with much stealth and agility, and disappeared as
mysteriously as he had come. If Jack or Geoffrey ever saw anything lying
about the premises they thought would be of use to Rankin, there was a
nocturnal steal, and up it went to Rankin's room. This was sport.
In this way Rankin lived. With one idea set before him, he grappled with
the leather-covered books that came by ones and twos into his room,
until, when the great struggle came at his final examinations, he was
surprised to find he had come out so well, and quite charmed when he
returned from Osgoode Hall to his dreary room, a solicitor of the
Supreme Court and a barrister-at-law, with a light heart, and not a
single solitary cent in the wide world.