“There, you see; that’s what his education at present amounts to; he’s a pretty bat, and doubtless looks forward to a life all flannels and cider-cup and yells of admiration when he makes a few runs; the sooner all that nonsense is knocked out of him the better.”
“But Rodney is not idle, Henry,” his mother pleaded; “his form-master and the Head both speak well of him and say that he has a very good chance next year, although he has missed this; you know the exam. came on just after his father’s death, when the boy was dreadfully upset.”
“I have made you an offer, you may take it or leave it. You can put him into one of my businesses; there will be no premium, and I’ll pay for his board at a thoroughly good boarding-house I know of in Mecklenburg Square, where he will be well looked after. In the meantime you must try to let this house, and then you can come up and live in the suburbs, and he can live with you and go to business every day by train; the little girls can go to a High School. With the many claims I have upon me, this is all that I can do, and I must serve you in the way that seems best to me.”
Uncle Henry sat down and took up the newspaper in token that the subject was thoroughly threshed out. He had gone into business at fourteen, and now at little past thirty had a house in Grosvenor Gardens and a “place down the river.” He had married at six-and-twenty, “going where money was.” The names of his two sons were down for Harrow, while his wife already talked of the time when she should “present” their baby girl. He quite acknowledged that it was his duty to help his sister now that the collapse of those Australian banks had practically beggared her; but there was at the back of his mind a lurking satisfaction that the way he had chosen should be one calculated to destroy those castles of tradition her husband had been so fond of building. It was a perpetual annoyance both to his wife and to himself that Rodney and his sisters should be so very different in appearance from their own children; that, clean or dirty, these children without a sixpence should so strongly resemble the old family portraits that his brother-in-law’s ridiculous will forbade to be sold; that they should in speech and bearing so unmistakably be gentlefolk, and yet be his own sister’s children seemed to him a proof of nature’s ineptitude.
To be sure he and Felcourt had been on friendly enough terms, but he had always—though through no fault of Felcourt’s—been conscious that his brother-in-law and his ancestors for generations belonged to a class which only of late, and that not altogether with enthusiasm, has opened its doors to successful men of Uncle Henry’s stamp.
Rodney’s mother went and stood by the open window. The active white figures flying between the wickets on the wide lawn seemed all blurred and indistinct, and she lifted her slim hand to her throat to still its throbbing ache; she was not a strong-minded woman. All she had asked of life was the power to make folks happy, and to be loved; and hitherto her desire had been generously fulfilled. Married at eighteen to a man who, taking her out of somewhat sordid and uncongenial surroundings, made her queen of a household where gaiety and good manners had been vassals for generations, she readily adapted herself to the new atmosphere, and became a sweet-voiced echo of her husband, and for fourteen years was absurdly happy. Then Rodney Felcourt died, and six months afterward came the collapse of the Australian banks.
Uncle Henry had a way of carrying through any course of action he had determined upon, and by the beginning of October his nephew Rodney found himself taking his exercise in the Gray’s Inn Road instead of in the playing-fields at school. The change of life was so radical and so sudden that the child hardly understood what had happened. Like the old woman in the nursery rhyme, he was forever exclaiming, “This be never I!” in melancholy astonishment. He was learning to tie up parcels, he stuck on endless quantities of postage stamps, and occasionally addressed a few envelopes for one of the typists. He did what he was told as well as he could, the day seemed endlessly long, and by evening he was so tired that he went to bed soon after the seven-o’clock dinner. A young boy for his age, he was quite unprecocious and unformed; hitherto his place in the universe had been clearly defined and not difficult to fill; to do well in his form, thus pleasing the “mater” and his form-master, to be “decent” to his little sisters at home, and “jolly” with the chaps at school, to be good at games and get into the “house” eleven, and to be absolutely “straight” in word, deed, and across country—such was Rodney’s conception of the whole duty of boy, and he had acted up to it with considerable success. Now, life was not only complicated but unintelligible, and he was too bewildered even to rebel against a fate that kept him tying up parcels indifferently well when he felt that by all the ordinary standards of conduct he ought to have been writing Latin verses.
Every Sunday he wrote neat, stilted little letters to his mother, which informed her that he had been to church at the Foundling, was going for a walk in the afternoon, that he was well and hoped that she was well, and that he was her very loving son. Felicia crushed the paper against her cheek in the vain attempt to extract from it something real and Rodney-like. She thought of the school letters last term, how full of life they had been, how numerous the requests they contained! Rodney never asked for anything now, and she knew that the boy was holding himself well in hand lest any part of the truth might hurt her.
At the end of October, Cecil Connop came back from Paris. His arrival was announced in all the papers, for he was of some importance in literary circles; his great ability was acknowledged on all sides, the more freely that he was something of a failure. Though his work was widely read and appreciated by cultivated people, he was not popular. His appearance was quite ordinary, and he made no attempt to resemble any historical personage. He abhorred advertisement, considering that his published writings had no sort of connection with his private life. His readers were quite ignorant as to whether he had a mother or not, and his personal friends suffered under no apprehension that their loves or their bereavements would figure, flimsily disguised, in his next book. His rooms in Jermyn Street had never been photographed, and only his servant knew whether he liked his bath hot or cold. The fact was that Cecil Connop kept one face for the world and quite another for the old friends who loved him—a proceeding so out of date among literary people as to be almost medieval. But it has its advantages for such as like curtains to their windows. According to his own account he never had any money, and was, when in England, in hourly danger of Holloway Jail; but he paid his card debts and never seemed to lack any of the things that go toward making life pleasant.
Felicia’s letter announcing little Rodney’s apprenticeship was a great surprise to Cecil. He had, of course, heard of her serious losses, but he knew that her brother was a wealthy man and “people always manage somehow”; that in this case they hadn’t “managed” came upon him with quite an unpleasant shock.