“Ay,” she said, with emphasis, “you have found me—you say well—found me when you were not looking for me. I accept the word as a good omen. And after that?”
If only she would not have abashed him from time to time with those dark sayings, which seemed to mean something to which he had no clue! He felt himself brought suddenly to a standstill in his grateful effusion of feeling, and put up his hand to arrest her in what she was evidently going on to say.
“Apart from that,” he said hurriedly, “I am not penniless. I have not been altogether dependent; at least, the form of my dependence has been the easiest one. I have had my allowance from my guardian ever since I came to man’s estate. It was my own, though, of course, of his giving. And I am not an extravagant fellow. It was not as if I wanted money for to-morrow’s living, for daily bread.” He coloured as he spoke, with the half pride, half shame, of discussing such a subject. “I think,” he said, throwing off that flush with a shake of his head, “that I have enough to take me back to South America, and there, I told you, I have friends. I don’t think I can fail to find work there.”
“But under such different circumstances! Have you considered? A poor clerk where you were one of the fine gentlemen of the place. Such a change of position is easier where you are not known.”
He grew red again, with a more painful colour. “I don’t think so,” he said quickly. “I don’t believe that my old friends would cast me off because, instead of being a useless fellow about town, I was a poor clerk.”
“Maybe you are right,” said Miss Bethune very gravely. “I am not one that thinks so ill of human nature. They would not cast you off. But you, working hard all day, wearied at night, with no house to entertain them in that entertained you, would it not be you that would cast off them?”
He looked at her, startled, for a moment. “Do you think,” he cried, “that poverty makes a man mean like that?” And then he added slowly: “It is possible, perhaps, that it might be so.” Then he brightened up again, and looked her full in the face. “But then there would be nobody to blame for that, it would be simply my own fault.”
“God bless you, laddie!” cried Miss Bethune quite irrelevantly; and then she too paused. “If it should happen so that there was a place provided for you at home. No, no, not what you call dependence—far from it, hard work. I know one—a lady that has property in the North—property that has not been well managed—that has given her more trouble than it is worth. But there’s much to be made of it, if she had a man who would give his mind to it as if—as if it were his own.”
“But I,” he said, “know nothing about the North. I would not know how to manage. I told you I had no education. And would this lady have me, trust me, put that in my hands, without knowing, without——”
“She would trust you,” said Miss Bethune, clasping her hands together firmly, and looking him in the face, in a rigid position which showed how little steady she was—“she would trust you, for life and death, on my word.”