“Oh, I wish you would,” I cried excitedly. “I do so want to be a true, good man—one such as papa used to speak of—one who could carve his way to a noble and honourable career, and grow to be loved and venerated and held in high esteem by the world at large. Oh, I would try so hard—I’d work night and day, and feel at last, that I had not tried in vain.”
“He-ar! he-ar! Brayvo, brayvo, youngster! Well done our side! That’s your style!” he cried, clapping his hands and stamping his feet as I stopped short, flushed and excited with the ideas that had come thronging to my brain, and then gazed at him in a shamefaced and bashful manner. “That’s your sort, my boy, I like that. I say, did your father teach you that sorter thing.”
“Yes. Mr Rev.—Yes, Bill.”
“I say, your par, as you called him, wasn’t a fool.”
“My papa,” I said proudly, “I mean my dear father, was the best and kindest of men.”
“That I’ll lay sixpence he was. Why, I was feeling quite out of heart about you, and thinking you such a hinnocent young goose that I shouldn’t know how to help you. Why, lookye here, I’ve been kicking about in the world ever since I was ten, and been in the police six years, and I couldn’t make a speech like that.”
“Couldn’t you, sir—Mr—I mean Bill?”
“No, that I couldn’t. Why, I tell you what. You and I’ll stick together and I don’t know what we mightn’t make of you at last—p’r’aps Lord Mayor o’ London. Or, look here, after a few years we might get you in the police.”
“In the police?” I faltered.
“To be sure, and you being such a scholard and writing such a hand—I know it, you know. Lookye here,” he continued, pulling out a pocket-book, from one of the wallets in which he drew a note I had written for Mary, “I say, you writing such a hand, and being well up in your spelling, you’d rise like a air balloon, and get to be sergeant, and inspector, and perhaps superintendent, and wear a sword! You mark my words, youngster; you’ve got a future before you.”