Harold Brookenham, whom Mr. Cashmore, ushered in and announced, had found in the act of helping himself to a cup of tea at the table apparently just prepared—Harold Brookenham arrived at the point with a dash so direct as to leave the visitor an option between but two suppositions: that of a desperate plunge, to have his shame soon over, or that of the acquired habit of such appeals, which had taught him the easiest way. There was no great sharpness in the face of Mr. Cashmore, who was somehow massive without majesty; yet he mightn’t have been proof against the suspicion that his young friend’s embarrassment was an easy precaution, a conscious corrective to the danger of audacity. It wouldn’t have been impossible to divine that if Harold shut his eyes and jumped it was mainly for the appearance of doing so. Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way. Mr. Cashmore had in fact looked surprised, yet not on the whole so surprised as the young man seemed to have expected of him. There was almost a quiet grace in the combination of promptitude and diffidence with which Harold took over the responsibility of all proprietorship of the crisp morsel of paper that he slipped with slow firmness into the pocket of his waistcoat, rubbing it gently in its passage against the delicately buff-coloured duck of which that garment was composed. “So quite too awfully kind of you that I really don’t know what to say”—there was a marked recall, in the manner of this speech, of the sweetness of his mother’s droop and the tenderness of her wail. It was as if he had been moved for the moment to moralise, but the eyes he raised to his benefactor had the oddest effect of marking that personage himself as a theme for the moralist.
Mr. Cashmore, who would have been very red-haired if he had not been very bald, showed a single eye-glass and a long upper lip; he was large and jaunty, with little petulant movements and intense ejaculations that were not in the line of his type. “You may say anything you like if you don’t say you’ll repay it. That’s always nonsense—I hate it.”
Harold remained sad, but showed himself really superior. “Then I won’t say it.” Pensively, a minute, he appeared to figure the words, in their absurdity, on the lips of some young man not, like himself, tactful. “I know just what you mean.”
“But I think, you know, that you ought to tell your father,” Mr. Cashmore said.
“Tell him I’ve borrowed of you?”
Mr. Cashmore good-humouredly demurred. “It would serve me right—it’s so wretched my having listened to you. Tell him, certainly,” he went on after an instant. “But what I mean is that if you’re in such straits you should speak to him like a man.”
Harold smiled at the innocence of a friend who could suppose him not to have exhausted that resource. “I’m ALWAYS speaking to him like a man, and that’s just what puts him so awfully out. He denies to my face that I AM one. One would suppose, to hear him, not only that I’m a small objectionable child, but that I’m scarcely even human. He doesn’t conceive me as with human wants.”
“Oh,” Mr. Cashmore laughed, “you’ve all—you youngsters—as many wants, I know, as an advertisement page of the Times.”
Harold showed an admiration. “That’s awfully good. If you think you ought to speak of it,” he continued, “do it rather to mamma.” He noted the hour. “I’ll go, if you’ll excuse me, to give you the chance.”
The visitor referred to his own watch. “It’s your mother herself who gives the chances—the chances YOU take.”