Mrs. D’Arcy-Muir moaned and dabbed her eyes again.
“Oh dear, oh dear!” she wailed. “When I think of all the sacrifices I have made to send you to college—and all the trouble I have had, really it seems too dreadful! A mother’s life is martyrdom—complete martyrdom! Why don’t you go and hunt up old Miss Letty?”
Then, and quite suddenly, Boy flared up. “Miss Letty! The Miss Letty who wanted to adopt me as a child—and you wouldn’t let her? Not I! It would have been a jolly sight better for me perhaps if I had been with her—but to go to her now—now, when I am expelled”—he choked at the word and had a struggle to go on—“and in disgrace,—now! No, mother, never!”
With a strange gesture, half of fury, half of despair, he turned and left her and went out of the house. His mother was far too unwieldy and comfortable in herself to rise from her chair and enquire where he was going, and though she called “Boy!” once as he disappeared, he did not hear her.
He had two or three pounds in his pocket, and rather than put up with any more useless reproaches and complaints at home, he decided to take a cheap lodging somewhere near the Strand, and seek for work,—any kind of work.
“It’s all the same,” he said with a sort of cynical philosophy which had come of “cramming” and the weariness resulting from that pernicious system—“whether one sweeps out an office or controls it, work of every kind is simply work. It only differs in the quality and the pay.”
In a few days, through the help of a young fellow he had known at Sandhurst, one who was unaffectedly sorry for his disgrace, he got a place as assistant clerk in an agency office. It was dull business, but he drudged through it uncomplainingly, and earned enough to keep himself going. Sometimes a vague idea occurred to him that he would go on the stage.
“Everyone does that when they are down on their luck!” he said. “I might begin as a super. But if I began as one I expect I should stay as one, for I haven’t an idea of acting. However, some people would say that is an advantage. Because if you can act, you may never get an engagement!”
He took to going to the theatre of an evening, and studying the various antics and grimaces of all the puppets in the different shows. Sometimes it amused him,—more often it bored him. But for a lonely and downhearted lad as he was, it was better to sit among human beings in the warmth and light, with the sound of music about him, than to be all alone in his cheap lodging, brooding on his miseries. One night he saw a very pretty little play performed, in which the heroine was a maiden lady who had made the mistake of loving where she was not loved. Something—a mere trifle of pathos—a touch of sentiment in one scene, suddenly called Miss Letty to his mind. Quite involuntarily, and almost as if his brain had taken to acting independently of himself, he began to retrace his life, and follow it backward step by step to his childhood’s days, till gradually, very gradually, small incidents and circumstances began to arrange themselves like the pieces of a puzzle, and he remembered a number of things he had long forgotten. Again he saw himself rambling down by the sea-shore, a solitary, sad little fellow, talking to Rattling Jack,—again he saw Miss Letty’s house in Scotland; and the memory of the last walk he had taken with her there through the Pass of Achray came back to him as freshly as if it had only happened yesterday.
Though his eyes were fixed on the stage he saw an entirely different picture from that which the actors were representing—a picture which had been blurred and blotted out from his mind for many years by the heavy mass of information which had been thrown at him to digest as best he might in the shortest possible time. This obscuration of mental faculty was beginning to clear like a thick fog away from the mirror of his brain, and with a strange pang of regret he recalled the gentle face, the soft voice, the sweet and kindly ways of the good woman who had loved him so much when a child. As soon as the play was ended he got up and went out with the rest, but lingered near the theatre door while the crowd of fashionable and unfashionable folk were hustling themselves and each other into cabs and carriages, watching each face as it passed by and wondering if by chance Miss Letty might be among them. Or if not, perhaps Major Desmond, to whom he would at once tell his miserable story,—the story of his disgrace at Sandhurst, which had not been so much his fault as that of a “superior” officer who had tempted him to drink and had laughed at him when drunk, himself escaping scot-free when the matter was inquired into, and the unhappy boy whom he had led to ruin was expelled. Yes—it might be well to confide in Major Desmond,—he would do so, he resolved, the very next day. With a deep sigh he roused himself from his reverie, and moved away from the threshold of the corridor to the theatre, where he had been standing, when suddenly his arm was touched timidly and a sweet anxious voice said,—