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.