“Of course you’re going to stay with me, old man?” said Eric, when he met me at Waterloo station next day. “You surely didn’t imagine I should let you go to an hotel?”
Nothing in these few words of the studied tone of unimpeachable politeness to which he had accustomed me at our last meeting. This was the hearty undergraduate greeting of old, and I needed no more to tell me that his sorrow on my account had dispersed the cloud that lay between us.
It was good to see him again; to feel the grasp of his strong hand, and read the look of welcome in his troubled eyes. And then we went to dine at ‘Simpson’s’ in reminiscence of the past, when I had had a pleasant balance to draw upon, and banks had not taken to breaking. And then for a long stroll and back again to his rooms.
“You see I’ve got them all ready for you, and the lobster supper that you always favoured, though how on earth you manage to sleep after it, passes my comprehension. And then we’ll chat on as in the good old days, and fancy ourselves undergraduates again, and that all this trouble is an evil dream. And remember that a room will always be kept ready for you in the future. Send me a wire when you want to use it, and the oftener you come and the longer you stay the better for me. But it’s late in the day of our friendship to be telling you all this, as if you hadn’t known it years and years ago.”
All my vague misgivings had vanished before his welcome, and it has dwelt with me since as a pleasurable thought that Eric, I am sure, meant fairly by me then, and that for what happened later on between us, the blame in part must rest with me, who had spread, however unwittingly, a snare before his feet.
After supper we drew up our chairs side-by-side before the fire—for the autumn evenings had become chilly now in town—and discussed the situation from every possible view and bearing, without, I candidly admit, finding any means of bettering it.
Eric was far too wise to offer me monetary help. But his hand-grasp told me I might have had it for the asking—aye, anything he could have given me. And I grew cheerier and more hopeful of the future, and thought with thankfulness how much it means to any man to have just one true friend in life. How few of us can say as much, especially when life’s sun begins to verge towards its setting, and the friends we have made are gone before us, and ourselves have lost the will and opportunity to win us new ones.
To-night I was tasting this cup of happiness in fullest measure. Time for me had rolled backwards, and he and I were together again—the friend in whom I could see no change; the lad who in days gone by had slipped up with me from Cambridge for many an evening just like this.
The next morning I went to call upon my agents, after arranging with Eric to meet him in the Strand at the private gallery where his picture was on view.
In those early days there was little information, I knew, to be expected from them, and such as it was it only went to confirm my gloomy forecast. The bank, they told me, was irretrievably ruined, and all the capital it could command would infallibly be called up.