“He who goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing,” he said to himself, softly. “I might have known—I might have known.”
He turned then and glanced at Esau, smiling faintly to see him asleep, and then his eyes met mine gazing at him fixedly, for somehow he seemed just then to have a something in his face that recalled my father, as he looked one day when he had had some very bad news—something about money. And as I gazed at our visitor that day the likeness seemed to grow wonderful, not in features, but in his aspect, and the lines about his eyes and the corner of his mouth.
“Ah, my lad,” he said, with a pleasant smile full of sadness, “you ought to pray that you might be always young and free from care. Good-day.”
He nodded and passed out of the office, and I heard his steps in the narrow lane.
I glanced at Esau, who was asleep still, then at the door of the inner office, and started as I heard a cough and the rustling of a newspaper. Then, gliding off my stool, I caught my cap from the peg where it hung, slipped out at the swing-door, and saw our late visitor just turning the corner at the bottom of the lane into Thames Street.
The next minute I had overtaken him, and he turned sharply with a joyful look in his eyes.
“Ah!” he said, “my cousin has sent you to call me back?”
“No, sir,” I stammered, with my cheeks burning; and there I stopped, for the words would not come.
How well I remember it! We were close to the open door of a warehouse, with the scent of oranges coming out strongly, and great muscular men with knots on their shoulders, bare-armed, and with drab breeches and white stockings, were coming up a narrow court leading to a wharf, bearing boxes of fruit from a schooner, and going back wiping their foreheads with their bare arms.
“You came after me?” said our visitor, with the old pained look in his eyes, as he half turned from me, and I stood turning over something in my hand.