After that they walked silently together half the length of the street before Fred spoke again. “You mean,” said he, “that a man must be either a genius or a journeyman.”
“Yes, Mr. Pickering; that, or something like it, is what I mean.”
Fred told Mr. Burnaby his whole story, walking up and down Museum Street,—even to that early assurance given to his young bride that there were worse things in the world than starvation. And then Mr. Burnaby asked him what were his present intentions. “I suppose we shall try it,” said Pickering with a forced laugh.
“Try what?” said Mr. Burnaby.
“Starvation,” said Fred.
“What! with your baby,—with your wife and baby? Come; you must take my ten-pound note at any rate. And while you are spending it write home to your father. Heaven and earth! is a man to be ashamed to tell his father that he has been wrong?” When Fred said that his father was a stern man, and one whose heart would not be melted into softness at the tale of a baby’s sufferings, Mr. Burnaby went on to say that the attempt should at any rate be made. “There can be no doubt what duty requires of you, Mr. Pickering. And, upon my word, I do not see what other step you can take. You are not, I suppose, prepared to send your wife and child to the poor-house.” Then Fred Pickering burst into tears, and Mr. Burnaby left him at the corner of Great Russell Street, after cramming the ten-pound note into his hand.
To send his wife and child to the poor-house! In all his misery that idea had never before presented itself to Fred Pickering. He had thought of starvation, or rather of some high-toned extremity of destitution, which might be borne with an admirable and perhaps sublime magnanimity. But how was a man to bear with magnanimity a poor-house jacket, and the union mode of hair-cutting? It is not easy for a man with a wife and baby to starve in this country, unless he be one to whom starvation has come very gradually. Fred saw it all now. The police would come to him, and take his wife and baby away into the workhouse, and he would follow them. It might be that this was worse than starvation, but it lacked all that melodramatic grandeur to which he had looked forward almost with satisfaction.
“Well,” said Mary to him, when he returned to her bedside, “who was it? Has he told you of anything? Has he brought you anything to do?”
“He has given me that,” said Fred, throwing the bank-note on to the bed, “—out of charity! I may as well go out into the streets and beg now. All the pride has gone out of me.” Then he sat over the fire crying, and there he sat for hours.
“Fred,” said his wife to him, “if you do not write to your father to-morrow I will write.”