II
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.