When it had been arranged that he was to leave the Leader, the manager exhibited almost indecent haste in appointing his successor, and was careful to remind him that although, as events turned out, he would be free to go in a month's time, the Company was entitled to at least three months' notice, and possibly six. Mr. Jones had a habit of making generosity fit in with business; he did not mention that he had secured a successor who was to receive £50 a year less than Henry had been getting. At one time an editor of the Leader had been paid as much as £750 a year, but that was in the days of a showy start, when money went out more rapidly than it came in, and during the succeeding years the pay-books would show a steady decline in the rate of editorial salaries. By strict limitation of payments, Mr. Jones was steadily increasing the dividends of the shareholders, and steadily depreciating the standard of the staff. The day that Henry left, the literary touch which Adrian Grant and a limited few had noticed in the Leader under his editorship disappeared, and the market and police intelligence again gave the tone of the sheet.
The most serious feature of his removal was the conduct of Miss Winton, who gave him more than one bad quarter of an hour for his selfishness in actually accepting the engagement "without a single thought of her." Flo harped so steadily on this note, that Henry was half-persuaded he was indeed a shamefully selfish young man; and when he closely examined his conduct, he wondered whether the satisfaction with which he had reported his fortune to his father arose from filial affection or from downright vanity.
The upshot of Miss Winton's exposition of his selfishness and her tearful protestations against his deserting her was a formal engagement, where only an "understanding" had existed before. This seemed to still her anxious heart, but Henry had made the proposition with none of the fervour with which more than once in fancy he had seen himself begging for her hand. In truth, his heart misgave him, and he did not mention the matter in any of his letters home. He rightly judged that such news might dull the keen edge of pleasure his London appointment would afford to his own folk at Hampton. He did not even mention it to Mr. Puddephatt. For the first time in his life he felt himself something of a dissembler. In this way his removal to London rather aggravated his state of mental unrest than modified it. His brightest dream had come true, but—
The first weeks in London, however, were so full of new sensations and agreeable distractions, that he had scarcely been a fortnight away from Laysford when it looked like a year. To walk down Fleet Street and the Strand each day, or to thread the old byways between the Embankment and Holborn, with the knowledge that no excursion train was to rush him off northward at the end of fourteen days, was a pleasure which only the provincial settling in London could enjoy. How he had longed for years to tread these pavements as a resident, and not merely as a gaping visitor. His feet gripped them while he walked, as though he thought at every stride, "Ye are firm beneath me at last, O Streets of London!"
Fleet Street, he knew in his heart, was outwardly as shabby a thoroughfare as ever served for the main artery of a great city, but he also knew that if the buildings were mean and the crowd that surged along its pavements as common to the eye as any in the frowsiest provincial city, there was more romance behind many of these shabby windows which bore the names of journals, famous and obscure, than in stately Whitehall or in Park Lane. The hum of printing-presses from dingy basements, the smell of printer's ink from many open doors, had a charm for him which perversely recalled the scent of new-mown hay in a Hampton meadow long years before.
At first, he rarely passed a street without noting its name, an odd building without finding something to engage his interest, a man of uncommon aspect without wondering who he might be—what paper did he edit? But soon his daily walk from his lodgings in Woburn Place to the office of the Watchman opposite the Law Courts was performed with less attention to the common objects of the route.
A sausage shop hard by his office, sending forth at all hours of the day a strong odour of frying fat and onions, remained the freshest of his impressions; he never passed it without thinking of its impertinence in such a quarter; but one day he discovered that it was not without claim to literary associations.
A young man with a chin that had required a shave for at least three days, wearing a shabby black mackintosh suggestive of shabbier things below, and boots much down at heel, came out of the shop with the aroma of sausage and onion strong upon him, and the fag-end of a savoury mouthful in the act of descending his throat. Something in the features of this dilapidated person struck Henry as oddly familiar, so that he glanced at him intently, and looked back, still puzzling as to who the fellow could be, when he found the shabby one looking at him, and evidently equally exercised concerning his identity. After a moment's hesitation, Henry walked back to him, and the sausage-eater flushed as he said:
"Why, Hen—Mr. Charles—can it be you? I knew you were in London, and had half a mind to call on you, but you—well—"
The reason why was too obvious to call for explanation.