So this was the mystery. Archie was henceforward, so it appeared, to live in an atmosphere of scented soap; his hope must centre in bubbles. He was to assist this Mr Glorie’s star to rise to the zenith, while his own fortune might sink to nadir. And he had paid his premium. It was swallowed up and simmering in that ugly old grease-pot, and except for the miserable salary he received from Mr Glorie he might starve.
Poor Archie! He certainly did not share his employer’s enthusiasm, and on this particular evening he did not walk home on feathers, and when he sat down to supper his face must have appeared to Sarah quite as long and lugubrious as Mr Glorie’s; for she raised her hands and said:
“Lawk-a-doodle, sir! What’s the matter? Have ye killed anybody?”
“Not yet,” answered Archie; “but I almost feel I could.”
He stuck to his work, however, like a man; but that work became more and more allied to soap, and the front shop hardly knew him any more.
He had informed the fellows at the club-room that he was employed at last; that he was apprenticed to the drug trade. But the soap somehow leaked out, and more than once, when he was introduced to some new-comer, he was styled—
“Mr Broadbent,” and “something in soap.”
This used to make him bite his lips in anger.
He would not have cared half so much had he not joined this very club, with a little flourish of trumpets, as young Broadbent, son of Squire Broadbent, of Burley Old Castle, England.
And now he was “something in soap.”