CHAPTER XIV
Lucian swooped down upon the humble dwelling in which his less fortunate fellow resided, like an angel who came to destroy rather than to save. He took everything into his own hands, as soon as the field of operations lay open to him, and it was quite ten minutes before Sprats, by delicate finesse, managed to shut him up in one room with the invalid, while she and the wife talked practical matters in another. At the end of an hour she got him safely away from the house. He was in a pleasurable state of mind; the situation had been full of charm to him, and he walked out into the street gloating over the fact that the sick man and his wife and children were now fed and warmed and made generally comfortable, and had money in the purse wherewith to keep the wolf from the door for many days. His imagination had seized upon the misery which the unlucky couple must have endured before help came in their way: he conjured up the empty pocket, the empty cupboard, the blank despair that comes from lack of help and sympathy, the heart sickness which springs from the powerlessness to hope any longer. He had read of these things but had never seen them: he only realised what they meant when he looked at the faces of the sick man and his wife as he and Sprats left them. Striding away at Sprats’s side, his head drooping towards his chest and his hands plunged in his pockets, Lucian ruminated upon these things and became so keenly impressed by them that he suddenly paused and uttered a sharp exclamation.
‘By George, Sprats!’ he said, standing still and staring at her as if he had never seen her before, ‘what an awful thing poverty must be! Did that ever strike you?’
‘Often,’ answered Sprats, with laconic alacrity, ‘as it might have struck you, too, if you’d kept your eyes open.’
‘I am supposed to have excellent powers of observation,’ he said musingly, ‘but somehow I don’t think I ever quite realised what poverty meant until to-night. I wonder what it would be like to try it for a while—to go without money and food and have no hope?—but, of course, one couldn’t do it—one would always know that one could go back to one’s usual habits, and so on. It would only be playing at being poor. I wonder, now, where the exact line would be drawn between the end of hope and the beginning of despair?—that’s an awfully interesting subject, and one that I should like to follow up. Don’t you think——’
‘Lucian,’ said Sprats, interrupting him without ceremony, ‘are we going to stand here at the street corner all night while you moon about abstract questions? Because if you are, I’m not.’
Lucian came out of his reverie and examined his surroundings. He had come to a halt at a point where the Essex Road is transected by the New North Road, and he gazed about him with the expression of a traveller who has wandered into strange regions.
‘This is a quarter of the town which I do not know,’ he said. ‘Not very attractive, is it? Let us walk on to those lights—I suppose we can find a hansom there, and then we can get back to civilisation.’
They walked forward in the direction of Islington High Street: round about the Angel there was life and animation and a plenitude of bright light; Lucian grew interested, and finally asked a policeman what part of the town he found himself in. On hearing that that was Islington he was immediately reminded of the ‘Bailiff’s Daughter’ and began to recall lines of it. But Islington and old ballads were suddenly driven quite out of his thoughts by an object which had no apparent connection with poetry.
Sprats, keeping her eyes open for a hansom, suddenly missed Lucian from her side, and turned to find him gazing at the windows of a little café-restaurant with an Italian name over its door and a suspicion of Continental cookery about it. She turned back to him: he looked at her as a boy might look whose elder sister catches him gazing into the pastry-cook’s window.