He had indeed paid very little attention to Henry, giving him no typewriting and only occasionally dictating to him very slowly a letter or two. He had been away in the country once for a week and had not taken Henry with him.
He had attempted no further personal advances, had been always kindly but nevertheless aloof. Henry had, on his side, made very few fresh discoveries.
He had met once or twice a brother, Tom Duncombe, a large, fat, red-faced man with a loud laugh, carroty hair, a smell of whisky and a handsome appetite. Friends had come to luncheon and Mr. Light-Johnson had been as constant and pessimistic as ever, but Henry had not trusted himself to a second outburst. Of his own private love-affair there is more to be said, but of that presently.
The salient fact in the situation was that until now Duncombe had not mentioned the letters, had not looked at them, had not apparently considered them. Every morning Henry, with beating heart, expected those dread words: "Well now, let's see what you've done"—and every day passed without those words being said.
Every night in his bed in Panton Street he told himself that to-morrow he would force some order into the horrible things, and every day he was once again defeated by them. He was now quite certain that they led a life of their own, that they deliberately skipped, when he was not looking, out of one pile into another, that they changed the dates on their pages and counterfeited handwritings, and were altogether taunting him and teasing him to the full strength of their yellow crooked little souls. And yet behind the physical exterior of these letters he knew that he was gaining a feeling for and a knowledge of the period with which they dealt that was invaluable. He had burrowed in the library and discovered a host of interesting details—books like Hogg's Reminiscences and Gibson's Recollections, and Washington Irving's Abbotsford and Lang's Lockhart, and the Ballantyne Protests and the Life of Archibald Constable—them and many, many others—he had devoured with the greed of a shipwrecked mariner on a desert island. He could tell you everything now about the Edinburgh of that day—the streets, the fashions, the clothes, the politics. It seemed that he must, in an earlier incarnation, have lived there with them all, possibly, he liked to fancy, as a second-hand bookseller hidden somewhere in the intricacies of the Old Town. He seemed to feel yet beating through his arteries the thrill and happy pride when Sir Walter himself with his cheery laugh, his joke and his kindly grip of the hand stood among the dusky overhanging shelves and gossiped and yarned and climbed the rickety ladder searching for some ballad or romance, while Henry, his eyes aflame with hero-worship, held that same ladder and gazed upwards to that broad-shouldered form.
Yes—but the letters were in the devil of a mess!
And then suddenly the blow fell. One beautiful June morning, when the sun, refusing to be beaten by the thick glare of the windows, was transforming the old books and sending mists of gold and purple from ceiling to floor, Henry, his head bent over files of the recalcitrant letters, heard the very words that for weeks he had been expecting.
"Now then—it's about time I had a look at those letters of yours."
It is no exaggeration at all to say that young Henry's heart stood absolutely still, his feet were suddenly like dead fish in his boots and his hands weak as water. This, then, was The End! Oh, how he wished that it had occurred weeks ago! He had by now become devotedly attached to the library, loved the books like friends, was happier when hidden in the depths of the little gallery nosing after Bage and Maturin and Clara Reeve than he had been in all his life before. Moreover, he realized in this agonizing moment how deeply attached he had grown during these weeks to his angular master. Few though the words between them had been, there seemed to him to have developed mysteriously and subterraneously as it were an unusual sympathy and warmth of feeling. That may have been simply his affectionate nature and innocence of soul. Nevertheless, there it was. He made a last frantic effort towards a last discipline, juggling the letters together and trying to put the more plainly dated next to one another on the top of the little untidy heaps.
He realized that there was nothing to be done. He sat there waiting for sentence to be pronounced.