“I s’pose,” said Tony softly, as if in answer to that unseen, persistent voice, “some folks ’as temples for bodies, and some folks ’as on’y tin churches, or, so to speak, a public.... I’d like a temple myself for ch’ice.”
He was not very sure what a temple was, but in a vague way he was assured that it was something large and beautiful; and his conception was helped out by hazy recollections of Sunday school and Solomon, and thoughts of a building spacious and white.
“There used to be a free night,” he continued, reverting again to the actual, “but the Corpeeration stopped it—I wonder w’y? It’s tuppence after six, that’s a shillin’ a week—’ow can pore boys get that?—an’ I promised ’im as I’d learn the others w’en I could get a chanst, when he’s learned me....”
Tony’s voice faltered, he was getting sleepy. He gave his smooth white arms another stroke, slipped into his nightshirt, and got into bed.
“E’ve give oi a shillin’ to pay for four more mornin’s, till ’e do go away,” he whispered ecstatically as he laid his head on the pillow, and Tony fell asleep.
That evening Tony’s elder brother “Earny,” who cleaned bicycles, and was ’prenticed to a dealer in the neighborhood, wanted his Sunday necktie, for he purposed to “walk out with his young lady.” He ran upstairs to the room he shared with Tony and another brother, to find the little boy fast asleep, worn out by unusual exercise and varied emotions.
Earny could not find his tie, and on lifting Tony’s trousers to see if by any chance it was hidden beneath them, a shilling rolled out of the pocket and finished spinning with a clang, just in the very centre of the patch of moonlight where a quarter of an hour earlier Tony had decided that he, at all events, “would ’ave a temple for ch’ice.”
“’Ullo!” thought Earny to himself, “where did that kid collar a bob? ’E bin a’ter no good, I’ll be boun’, so secret-like and sayin’ nothin’ to nobody. Serve ’im right if I buys some smokes with ’un;” and Earny departed quietly, without having fulfilled his original intention of waking Tony that he might look for the missing necktie.
At nine o’clock the following morning Tony still lay upon his bed, wide-eyed, white-cheeked, with blank despair writ large upon his face. Breakfast was over long ago, his family had all departed to their daily work; his mother was ironing in the kitchen, he could hear the bump of the iron as she slammed it on the table; the bedroom could wait till one of the girls came in at dinner-time, so no one interfered with Tony.
He knew that it was his brother who must have taken the shilling—the precious shilling that had meant so much to him. He knew that he had no redress, no one would believe him if he told them how he came by it, and in his utter misery he was too poor-spirited even to think of reprisals. His whole imagination centred round the dreadful certainty that Sergeant and the little gen’leman and the little gen’leman’s brother would think him a fraud. For a brief space the sun had shone out on his drab life, discovering hitherto undreamt-of colors in the landscape, but now....