Bindo was very docile as a rule, especially in the hands of those who
loved and cared for him. But on some points he was obdurate as steel.
For instance, I could never persuade him, try what I would, to invest his
salary, nor could anything induce him to learn a profession against the
day when his voice should fail him. Singing, he said, had come naturally
to him; a good voice, a good ear, and a little training had done the
trick; and he thought, or pretended to think, that the evil day, when it
did come, would bring with it its own resource. “Sufficient unto the day
is the _good_ thereof” was Bindo’s motto throughout.
And it was impossible to teach him the value of money. He spent it
royally on others, lavishly on himself. “Where have you been, Bindo?” I
said to him one Monday, when he hadn’t turned up as usual on the previous
afternoon. “Oh, I took Harry out of town. He’s been seedy, you know,
and wanted change. So we went to Brighton.” “And you travelled
first-class, and put up at the Bedford, and lost money to him at cards in
the evening?” “You have hit it _exactly_, old man,” was the reply.
I believe that most of his money went on Quixotic kindnesses of this
sort. One night when I was with him at the Queen’s Hall (he liked to run
round to me between his “turns” and criticise the show from the front)
his salary for two nights went before it was earned to the first violin,
a blind little snuff-powdered man, but Bindo’s very particular friend,
because he had stumbled in getting down from the stage and damaged his
instrument.
When the end did come, it came suddenly. His voice cracked on an upper
G—sudden and short like the string of a violin—in the very hall he had so
emphatically abused for its acoustic deficiencies. Of course he came to
me, if it can be said that he came to me, when he had always been with me
for most of his time. But the life bored him. I had my own work to do
in the evenings, and couldn’t go with him to restaurants, theatres, and
concerts, the excitement of which had become a second nature to Bindo.
And so we drifted, little by little, but still very surely, farther and
farther apart.
It was about this time that his friend Harry, the same whom he had
entertained so royally at Brighton, fell ill. Bindo had been anxious
about him for a long while, and never passed a day without seeing him.
But it was only quite lately that the doctors had begun to suspect a
rapid form of consumption. Bindo was full of trouble. I think he liked
Harry best of all his friends, perhaps excepting me.
One day he burst into my room, with something more akin to tears in his
eyes than I had ever seen in them before. “What _is_ to be done,
Charlie? They’ve given Harry the sack at his office because he’s too ill
to do his work properly. They won’t even keep it open for him for a week
or two on the chance. What brutes they are! And, poor old chap, he’s
got nothing. If it were only this time last year, and I had my voice
again, we could do famously. I wish I’d taken your advice, old man, and
saved my pile while I had the chance. By the way: happy thought! I have
a heap of rings and pins and watches at home that the swells gave me last
year for singing at their matinees and concerts—enough of them to stock a
pawnshop. By Jove! they _shall_ help to stock Attenborough’s; and we’ll
live on the proceeds, at any rate till things look more rosy.” He was
off then and there, and for the next six months, till Harry died, I
scarcely saw him. One excitement in his case had cast out the others,
and while Harry lived he hardly cared to be outside his room. Brother
and nurse in one he was to him—with him night and day—and, whatever money
or love could do, Bindo did for him.
Afterwards he came back to me, looking a trifle older, a trifle more
depressed; but improved, or so it seemed to me, by the experience he had
undergone. I forgot that there are natures receptive of vigorous and
even intense impressions, but absolutely incapable of retaining them. So
soon as one predominant idea has passed from the brain, its place must be
occupied by another, for good or else for evil. Which of the two it may
be, seems almost a matter of indifference; it is the law, so to speak, of
their being that it _should_ be indifferent.
I almost wished in those days that I could fall ill myself. Five or six
months of nursing under Bindo’s hand would have been a lazy delight to
me, and (selfish as it may seem) better far for him than the life he was
leading. Unhappily I never felt fitter, much too fit and too
self-occupied to be interesting to Bindo, and so he left me for others,
more at liberty and likely to be more amusing.
All this time he was (to quote his own words) “looking about for
something”—the Micawber-like expression that does duty for an idle life.
Whatever Bindo’s interpretation may have been, I know it made him very
late in coming home of an evening. Yet he never asked me for money. His
resources seemed boundless, and the stock of rings and watches
inexhaustible. But, portable and useful property as they are, you must
have a good supply of them in hand to live upon it for a year in the
style Bindo was doing. Besides, it occurred to me as strange that I had
never had a sight of them; in old days I had always had the first view of
any present that was made him. On another point, too, he was inflexible
as ever. Advice and help towards securing permanent employment he
absolutely and positively refused. “Better that, old boy,” he said,
“than do what most people do—bother their friends all round for an
opinion when they’ve decided all along to follow their own.”
Your practical and steady-going individual—the one, for example, who can
“see nothing” in _Alice in Wonderland_—never admits into his reckoning
the influence of excitement. It disturbs and disarranges his equilibrium
of life. Yet, disparage it as you may, it is one of the most important
factors in shaping life and character, and perhaps the very strongest
lever that operates for the development of vice. Fortunately, a fair
number of mankind can do with a small and weak modicum of this dangerous
stimulant. Individuals like Bindo, who ask for more, are classed among
the eccentricities of nature, for whom it is impossible to prescribe.
Yet, think what it means for a boy of sixteen, without discipline or
experience to steady him, to drop, literally in a moment, from notoriety
to neglect, activity to stagnation; almost from life to death.
No wonder Bindo pined and drooped. I knew the alternative that lay
before him: life and death—not in metaphor this time, but in sober
earnest. Yet I let him go, for he had taught me himself, if I had wanted
the knowledge, that no man can cage a human will. So from the very
moment I had become more hopeful about him, the gulf widened between us.
But only in companionship; never in spirit—
“For, till the thunder in the trumpet be,
Soul may divide from body, but not we,
One from the other.”
Meanwhile he had retained all his old friends—no one who had known Bindo
was in a hurry to part company with him—but he had made other and less
reputable ones. The strange and (to me) disquieting element in the
situation was that he never, even now, seemed to be in want of money.
Yet Harry’s illness alone must have cost him a fortune. All his old
luxuries were resumed. Dinners to his friends, at which Bindo was always
paymaster, with periodical trips to Brighton and Bournemouth for change,
succeeded one another with the same regularity as when the boy was
earning £10 a night. “Where _does_ the money come from?” I asked myself
again and again. Alas! the knowledge was to come soon.
Late one evening, as I was finishing an article for the editor who
employed me, Thorne and Eastonville called at my rooms. That they had
come on no pleasant errand was written on their faces. “Charlie,” said
Thorne, “we are here on a disagreeable business. I hope it may prove
less disagreeable than it looks. The fact is we’ve been losing a lot of
things for some time past; at least we’ve tried our level best to _think_
we’ve lost them. But it won’t do. The thing is far too systematic to be
accidental. Sometimes it has been money—a sovereign or two at a time;
then it was a diamond ring of Eastonville’s that went, and then some
valuable scarf-pins of mine. So the thing must be stopped. But who has
done it? I may as well out with it at once, though it burns my throat to
tell it. We can’t help fancying it’s Bindo. No one but he has had
access to our rooms at all hours, and you know how suspicious he has made
us all by the pile of money he’s been spending.”
“Yes: it _is_ Bindo, Thorne.”
What was the good of attempting to deny it, when it flashed across me in
a moment where all his jewellery had come from? No, not all perhaps.
Probably—for I never asked him—he had started with articles that were
legitimately his own, and then, when these had failed him, had been
tempted to supplement them less creditably in the time of Harry’s need.
Of course we found the things, as I anticipated, at Attenborough’s; all
of them, that is, but one. Bindo was not the boy to try and hide his
work, as an expert would have done, by distributing the articles at
different shops, or even by signing under an assumed name. On the
contrary, there was a contemptuous candour in his method of dealing that
actually surprised and puzzled us for a moment at starting.
I would allow no one but myself to liquidate on behalf of Bindo. But I
as steadily refused to be the bearer to him of the discovery we had made.
None of the others volunteered for the office, or showed the faintest
ambition to be the one selected for the murder of a friendship. So we
cast lots for the office, whose it should be, in true melodramatic style,
and the lot fell upon me.
“Cheer up, old fellow,” said Eastonville. “Bindo’s a deal fonder of you
than he is of the rest of us, and won’t take it so hardly if it comes
through you. The fact is we’ve spoiled him; all of us, that is, but you.
And he knew it too, and I believe he liked the preaching you gave him
better than all my five-pound notes; not that he showed any objection to
the notes, I’m bound to say. Now, don’t look so savage, old man. I’m
bound to try and laugh over it, because, if I didn’t, I feel sure I
should do the other thing. And after all this business may be the making
of Bindo.”
But he didn’t know Bindo as I did. The boy came to me with outstretched
hand, and with the old frank look in his eyes. But I could not trust
myself to return it. What I did, must, I felt, be done quickly. If I
waited for words in which to break the news to him; above all, if I gave
him the chance of speaking first, I knew it was all up with me. So I
just put the things on the table in front of him—how I hated the sight of
them!—and said, “These things have come into my hands, no matter by what
means.” He looked at them, and the faintest flush imaginable crept over
his face. “Before you leave me to-night we will do them up for the post,
and you will address them to the respective owners and leave them in my
hands.” I did not dare to look at him, but turned away to another table,
making up the parcels one by one and handing them to him where he stood
behind my back. He addressed each parcel as he received it, never
betraying by a word or sign what I knew the effort must have cost him.
“And now, Eric, you and I part company.” I saw him wince at the name;
almost as if he had received a blow. No doubt it implied to him, far
more plainly than I had intended, that the Bindo of the past was lost
beyond recall. It was not said in heedlessness, still less in
heartlessness; it was simply loss of self-control. The old familiar name
_could_ not be forced past my lips. In a moment I saw what I had done,
and would have given worlds to repair it. “Bindo,” I cried impulsively,
“come back.” But it was too late; the mischief was done. I had lost my
last chance by that one word.
“Good-bye,” he answered, and was gone.