THE CALM BEFORE.
Long after the storm had broken and rolled away were we still sitting
talking in the dim lamplight. In these hours I learned what dark
confidences my friend had to give me as to his solitary and haunted
past; learned more truly, also, than I had ever done as yet, the value
of a moral courage that had enabled him, dogged by the cruelest hate
of adversity, to emerge from the furnace noble and thrice refined.
He had been picked up, as a mere child drowning in the river, by the
Thames police and had been ultimately consigned to a charity school,
from which, in due course, he had been apprenticed to a printer. Thus
far had his existence, emerging from profoundest gloom, run a straight
and uneventful course--but before?
Into what deadly corner of a great city’s most secret burrows his
young life had been first hemmed and then crushed out of shape who may
say? When I had got him down again, unnerved but quiet now and wistful
with apology over his outburst, he told me all that he knew.
“Thunder always seems to turn my brain a little, Renny, perhaps
because it is associated in the depths of my mind with that strange
young experience. The muttering sound of it brings a picture, as it
were, before my eyes. I seem to see a confusion of wharfs and
monstrous piles of blackness standing out against the sky; deadly
water runs between, in which smudges of light palpitate and are
splintered into arrows and come together again like drops of
quicksilver.”
“And you are given something to drink?”
“It is poison; I know it as certainly as that it is my father who
wishes to be quit of me. I can’t tell you how I know.”
“And before?”
“There is only the room and the window in the roof, and myself, a
sickly cripple lying in bed, always alone and always fearful of
something.”
“Duke, was the gentle woman your mother?”
“I feel that it must have been. But she went after a time. Perhaps he
killed her as he wished to kill me.”
“Can you remember him at all?”
“Only through a dreadful impression of cruelty. I know that I am what
I am by his act; though when made so, or under what provocation, if
any, is all a blank. It is the dog that haunts my memory most. That
seems queer, doesn’t it? I suppose it was the type or symbol of all
the hate I was the victim of, and I often feel as if some day I shall
meet it once more--only once more--and measure conclusions with it on
that little matter of the suffering it caused me.”
We fell silent for awhile. Then said I, softly: “Duke, with such a
past for background, I think I can understand how Dolly must stand out
in the front of your picture.”
“Yes,” he said, with a tender inflection in his voice. “But anyhow I
have no quarrel with her sex. What should I have been without that
other presence in the past? I have known only two women intimately.
For their sake my right arm is at the service of all.”
His eyes shone upon me from the sallow, strong face. He looked like a
crippled knight of errantry, fearless and dangerous to tamper with
where his right of affection was questioned.
The week that followed was barren of active interest. It was a busy
one at Great Queen street, and all personal matters must needs be
relegated to the background. Occasionally I saw Dolly, but only in the
course of official routine, and no opportunity occurred for us to
exchange half a dozen words in private.
Nevertheless, there was in the dusty atmosphere of the place a
sensation of warmth and romance that is scarcely habitual to the
matter-of-fact of the workshop. Compromise with my heart as I might on
the subject of Zyp’s ineffaceable image, I could not but be conscious
that Ripley’s at present held a very pretty and tender sentiment for
me. The sense of a certain proprietorship in it was an experience of
happiness that made my days run rosily, for all the perplexity in my
soul. Yet love, such as I understood it in its spiritual
exclusiveness, was absent; nor did I ever entertain for a moment the
possibility of its awakening to existence in my breast.
So the week wore on and it was Saturday again, and to-morrow, for good
or evil, the question must be put.
That evening, as Duke and I were sitting talking after supper, Jason’s
voice came clamoring up the stairs and a moment after my brother burst
into the room. He was in high spirits--flushed and boisterous as a
young Antinous--and he flung himself into a chair and nodded royally
to Duke.
“Renny’s chum, I suppose?” said he. “And that’s a distinction to be
proud of, for all it’s his brother that says so. Glad to know you,
Straw.”
Duke didn’t answer, but he returned the nod, striving to gloze over
prejudice genially for my sake.
“Renny, old chap!” cried Jason, “I sha’n’t want my friend at court
yet--not yet, by a long chalk, I hope. Look here.”
He seized a purse from his pocket and clapped it down on the table
with a jingling thud.
“There’s solid cash for you, my boy! Forty-three pounds to a penny,
and a new pleasure to the pretty face of each of ’em.”
“Where on earth did you get it, Jason?”
“Won’t you be shocked, Barebones? Come with me some night and see for
yourself.”
“You’ve been gambling, I believe.”
“Horrid, isn’t it?--the wailing baby and the deserted wife and the
pistol in a garret--that’s what you are thinking of, eh? Oh, you dear
thing! But we aren’t built alike, you and I.”
“Be quiet, can’t you?” I cried, angrily.
“Not a bit of it. I’m breezy as a weathercock to-night. I must talk, I
tell you, and you always rouse the laughing imp in me. Where’s the
harm of gambling, if you win? Eh, Jack Straw?”
“It’s no very good qualification for work, if that’s what you want to
get, Mr. Trender.”
“Work? Hang the dirty rubbish! Work’s for the poor in pocket and in
spirit. I want to see life; to feel the sun of enjoyment down to my
very finger-tips. You two may work, if you like, with your codes of
cranky morals. You may go back to your mill every Monday morning with
a guilty sense of relief that another weekly dissipation on Hampstead
heath is over and done with. That don’t do for me. The shops here
aren’t all iron-ware and stationery. There’s color and glitter and
music and rich food and laughter everywhere around, and I want my
share of it. When I’m poor I’ll work; only--I don’t ever intend to be
poor again.”
“Well, we don’t any of us intend to, for the matter of that,” said
Duke.
“Oh, but you go the wrong way about it. You’re hampered in the
beginning with the notion that you were made to work, and that if you
do it in fine manly fashion your wages will be paid you in full some
day. Why, what owls you are not to see that those wages that you think
you are storing up so patiently are all the time being spent by such
as me! Here’s happiness at your elbow, in the person of Jason
Trender--not up in the skies there. But it’s your nature and luckily
that’s my gain. You wouldn’t know how to enjoy ten thousand a year if
you had it.”
“You think not?”
“I know it. You’d never be able to shake off the old humbug of
responsibility.”
“Toward others, you mean?”
“Of course I do, and that’s not the way to make out life.”
“Not your way?”
“Mine? Mine’s to be irresponsible and independent--to act upon every
impulse and always have a cat by me to claw out the chestnuts.”
“A high ideal, isn’t it?”
“Don’t fire that nonsense at me. Ideal, indeed! A cant term, Jack
Straw, for a sort of religious mania. No ideal ever sparkled like a
bottle of champagne. I’ve been drinking it for the first time lately
and learning to play euchre. I’ve not proved such a bad pupil.”
He slapped the pocket to which he had returned his purse, with a
joyous laugh.
“Champagne’s heaven!” he cried. “I never want any better. Come out
with me to-morrow and taste it. Let’s have a jaunt!”
Duke shook his head.
“We shouldn’t agree in our notions of pleasure,” said he.
“Then, come you, Renny, and I’ll swear to show you more fun in a day
than you’ve known in all your four years of London.”
“I can’t, Jason. I’ve got another engagement.”
“Who with?”
“Never mind. But I can’t come.”
“Oh, rubbish! You’ll have to tell me or else we go together.”
“Neither the one nor the other.”
For a moment he looked threatening. “I’m not fond of these mysteries,”
he said. Then his face cleared again.
“Well,” he cried, “it’s a small matter for me, and, after all, you
don’t know what you miss. You don’t keep whisky here, I suppose?”
“No, we don’t drink grog, either of us.”
“So I should have thought. Then I’ll make for livelier quarters”--and
crying good-night to us, he went singing out of the room.
The moment I heard the outer door shut on him, I turned to Duke.
“Don’t hold me responsible for him,” I said. “You see what he is.”
“Renny,” said Duke, gravely, “I see that friendship is impossible to
him, and can understand in a measure what he made you suffer.”
“Yet, I think, it’s true that he’s of the sort whom fortune always
favors.”
“They sign a compact in blood for it, though, as the wicked baron does
in the story books.”
He smiled and we both fell silent. Presently Duke said from the
darkness:
“Where has he put up in London?”
“I don’t know. He wouldn’t say. I’m not particularly anxious to find
out as long as he keeps away from here.”
“Ah, as long as he does,” said my companion, and sunk into a pondering
fit again.
“Get off early to-morrow,” he said, suddenly. “What time have you
arranged to--to meet Dolly?”
“Half-past nine, Duke.”
“Not before? Well, be punctual, there’s a good fellow. She’s worth an
effort.”
I watched him, as he rose with a stifled sigh and busied himself over
lighting our bedroom candle. In the gusty dance of the flame his eyes
seemed to change and glint red like beads of garnet. I had no notion
why, but a thrill ran through me and with it a sudden impulse to seize
him by the hand and exclaim: “Thank God, we’re friends, Duke!”
He startled a little and looked full in my face, and then I knew what
had moved me.
Friends were we; but heaven pity the man who made him his enemy!