Mrs. Strong’nth’arm’s idea had been to call upon some half a dozen likely parents, to appeal to them for their support of a most deserving case: a young would-be schoolmaster of whose character and ability she could not speak too highly.
“And they’ll tell you it’s very kind of you to try and assist the poor young gentleman, but that as regards their own particular progeny they’ve decided to send him somewhere else,” explained Anthony.
“How do you know?” argued his mother. “Why, Mrs. Glenny, the china shop woman, was telling me only a month ago how worried she was about her boy, not knowing where to send him.”
“You drop in on Mrs. Glenny,” counselled Anthony, “and talk about the weather and how the price of everything is going up. And as you’re coming away just mention casually how everybody is talking about this new school that Mr. Tetteridge has just started; and how everybody is trying to get their boys into it; and how they won’t be able to, seeing that young Tetteridge has told you that he can only receive a limited number; and how you’ve promised Mrs. Herring to use your influence with Tetteridge in favour of her boy Tom. Leave Mrs. Glenny to do the rest.”
People had a habit of asking Anthony his age; and when he told them they would look at him very hard and say: “Are you quite sure?”
His uncle was taken ill late in the year. He had caught rheumatic fever getting himself wet through on the moors. He made a boast of never wearing an overcoat. Anthony found him sitting up in bed. A carpenter friend had fixed him up a pulley from the ceiling by which he could raise himself with his hands. Old Simon was sitting watching him, his chin upon the bed. Simon had been suffering himself from rheumatism during the last two winters and seemed to understand.
“Don’t tell your aunt,” he said. “She’ll have them all praying round me and I’ll get no peace. But I’ve got a feeling it’s the end. I’m hoping to slip off on the quiet, like.”
Anthony asked if he could do anything. He had always liked his uncle; they felt there was a secret bond between them.
“Look after the old chap,” his uncle answered; “that is if I go first.”
He stretched out a stiff arm and laid it on old Simon’s head. “Ninety years old he’ll be on the fourteenth,” he said, “reckoning six years of a dog’s life as equal to one of a man’s. And I’m sixty-five. We haven’t done so badly, either of us.”